There is no "Free Market" Housing Solution

The way the house price inflation has grown up in Britain, it actually shows us that how tougher it has became for the younger generation to buy a house for them. The Green ideology is a great thing to adopt with but people need to have the freedom to built their own house to the best of their capabilities. To adopt the green ideology if we fall short of our capability how in the earth we can create new houses. If still they are planning to adopt it then they should also declare some sort of subsidy to create greener houses since the cost to install a green house is much higher.

Thanks for sharing your great informative post. The global financial meltdown is over and the real estate market is on a boom again. Your graphical representation, based on statistics, supports the same fact. Thanks again for making us aware about the latest real estate trends.

Ian, just so you know how much I respect your argument; THIS is what I have started saying now on Interest.Co.Nz

http://www.interest.co.nz/ratesblog/index.php/2010/01/04/eight-thousand-...

".....Jimmybob, if you haven't read Robert Bruegmann's "The Housing Bubble and the Boomer Generation", you would find it extremely interesting. He calls what has happened with house prices, "The biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history".

http://www.newgeography.com/content/00452-the-housing-bubble-and-boomer-...

The underlying cause of all this, is urban limits being unnecessarily restrictive, so that property developers have to take part in a bidding war for the available land, and /or finance ownership of it for years before they actually do the development. This is why council planners can say they release "enough" land to satisfy growth, yet prices are far too expensive.

$250K for a section is racketeering, given historical norms and the cost of farmland just over the urban limit. In the USA, there are still thousands of jurisdictions with loose enough urban limits, that the price of sections relates directly to that of farmland, plus development costs, plus a fair profit. The comparison with the prices in urban limit regimes like NZ and California, is around ten to twenty times. Enough has been written on this by Hugh Pavletich, Arthur Grimes, Don Brash and numerous overseas authors.

Ian Abley of "AudaCity" in the UK, is actually attempting to get an "illegal settlement" movement underway in protest against all this, having lost patience for political-legal reforms that will not happen because of incumbency. I must admit a good deal of sympathy for this approach. Imagine a well publicised movement presenting the prospect of thousands of young people getting $5,000 sections outside the urban limits, which cost could go up by $10,000 or $20,000 if services were provided. The $200,000 plus involved in the status quo, is almost ENTIRELY a "planning tax" or rather, the result of a "cap and trade scheme" in urban land......"

http://www.newgeography.com/content/001261-there-no-free-market-housing-...

Appreciate the really valuable work you do, Hugh. I think Ian is right about the main political obstacle being the effect of development liberalisation on existing home owners equity, and the possibility of an economic crash being triggered by a drop in property values that would have to come. That is why I suggest that this is done gradually and in tandem with a few years of inflationary monetary policy.

In any case, governments need to realise that the status quo is only contributing to ongoing malinvestment, housing shortages and underemployed construction capital and labour; and depression of sorely needed economic growth; and that even worse crashes will surely result, culminating in the final, unmanageable one that Ludwig Von Mises in particular warned would be the ultimate consequence of monetary inflation and the setting up of new bubbles in response to every recession. The fact that the bubbles now occur in land values as well as in shares and financial instruments, make them many times more destructive. It is a wonder that the British economy has lasted as long as it has since 1947.

One counter-advantage of reform that brings land prices down and reduces home-owner equity, is that at least construction capital and labour will be employed again and all sorts of economic positives will flow on, including the ease of new business startups in cheap premises; which just happens to be the main source of all economic growth. Some gifted political salesmanship could well get this message across to the public. David Lange in his prime could certainly have done it if he wanted to.

I have personally been trying to interest specific local governments in land reform, as there would be huge competitive advantages to be gained for them over the non-reforming regions. Local governments have the authority to do this without coercion from central government. I would very much like to see a properly done presentation taken on the road around local authorities, both to the elected representatives and the planners, many of whom may merely need exposure to facts for the first time.

In that T.J. Rogers open letter I linked to above, he refers to some colloquial business acronyms in use in the USA: "ABC" stands for "Anywhere But California"; "GTT" stands for "Gone To Texas". There is absolutely no reason that the North of England could not one day set itself up as Britain's Texas, if they did the reforms and the rest of Britain did not.

That paper on California referred to by Hugh is yet another useful one on this subject; yet the USA's most influential analysts remain, so far, dead from the neck upwards on this issue. (Thomas Sowell in particular should be taken much more notice of than he is, being about the only broad picture economist-philosopher not specialised in land and urban economics, who has "got it"). If California and the other basket case "Big Statist" States get propped up for too long by the Federal government, I fully expect to see a new secession movement get underway on the part of the "still free" States.

Ian, you address Hugh there with a response to one of my points. I am unsure if my views and Hugh's are interchangeable although we obviously agree on most of what gets raised here. But I get into the political ideology side of things, and he very much refuses to do so.

I am finding this discussion interesting.

I think that the situation you describe, where workers are somehow paid less than the value of their work, due to the power of capital holders over them, is in one sense an anachronism. Joseph Schumpeter in "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" describes very well the increasing disparity between this Marxist theory and reality, as full employment is reached in a developing economy.

I do not think that people in modern first world economies are still paid "less than the value of their work", other than in comparatively small degrees and isolated instances, as the result of State and Trade Union interference in free markets. You yourself say, 100% accurately, that the period prior to your infamous 1947 Act, was one in which home ownership was a practically attainable goal for the most, even low income earners. It still was a practically attainable goal in Australia, NZ, and the USA, until the same urban planning mania seized hold there too. It still is a practically attainable goal in the "non progressive" States of the USA. This is all watertight evidence, to my mind, that true free markets do not at all conform to the Marxist myth of exploitation of the proletariat.

The things that you blame "Capitalism" for, I blame Statism and Socialism. But you are right that the labels are pointless. The problem we are discussing is State interference in free markets, whether the State has been captured by a "Big Business" conspiracy or by a leftwing "Long March through the institutions". I incline to the latter. I do not believe for a moment that political power after the sort of crash that is being engineered, will fall into the hands of anyone other than outright leftwing rabble rousers. The onetime big business manipulators will be either deep in hiding or dead. Lenin had it exactly right, that these people would sell you the rope you use to hang them.

Plenty has been written about Gramscian Marxism. The problem confronted by Marxists attempting to radicalise the proletariat as economies in Christendom developed, was that the proletariat were too happy and optimistic for the future, given the rate at which they were progressing out of the pre-free-market conditions of the past. The intellectual Left therefore, have set themselves for decades, to deliberately undermine the benefits brought by the free market in tandem with Christian ethics, so as to create a disaffected proletariat. To this end, they have captured society's institutions, beginning with the universities, but including now to the greater extent, the teaching profession, journalism, law, social policy, and most government bureaucracies, including urban planning.

Most people following the Left's litanies are dupes. But at the core of all this are intellectuals like Marcuse and Foucault and Derrida and their inheritors, who KNOW what their work is dedicated to. You are concerned, like me, at the grip that lies about the environment have on the public, lies that have been completely debunked over and over again by people like Julian Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, Indur Goklany, George Reisman, Steven F. Hayward, and Patrick Moore. I am entirely accustomed to these people being condemned by Leftwing activists, as "stooges of big business". I think you see Greenpeace as the stooges of big business, and in a sense I agree with you. But I see the Left as the drivers of all this, and the moneyed funders of the likes of Greenpeace and all the other society-weakening grievance industries, as the suckers. (I think you see the moneyed funders as the main drivers and the lefty activists as the suckers). You see these lies as initiated by big business for their own advantage. Yet I see them as maintained only by the Left's grip on the education and media institutions.

Environmentalism is just one facet of all this. I mention grievance industries and bureaucracies. Almost ALL the various bureaucracies follow litanies, mostly derived from the grievance industries themselves, that are every bit as false in their derivation as the environmentalist litanies are.

I think the consistent political solution to all this, is small government libertarianism - in fact, the USA as its founders intended is about the best we can do. Texas is probably the closest to it today, and happens to be the easiest place in the world where anyone can get themselves housed and mortgage free. I find the antagonism to this suggestion, from leftists who are intelligent enough to break out of the litanies and admit the real problems, inexplicable; and am left wondering whether functioning and obviously beneficial free markets are in fact their worst fear rather than the evil manipulated markets.

I strongly recommend THIS open letter by Silicon Valley entrepreneur T. J Rodgers, arguing that California has now destroyed the conditions under which Silicon Valley was able to begin, especially cheap land and cheap small business premises, provided by developers meeting a demand.

http://www.fcpp.org/images/publications/Cyprus%20letter.pdf

It is not just a case of the proletariat being squashed into a situation in which they can be exploited. One of the major contributing factors to first world economies being "priced out of the world market" and hence wages being squeezed in tandem with business profits, is our mania for urban limits. Farming and agriculture are the only part of our economies that are favoured with land at at fair price. This makes no sense given the dollar profit return and wages paid, per unit of land utilised in comparison to the rest of the economy.

Most economic growth and employment comes from newly started businesses. Driving up the cost of commercial land affects all these potential new startups adversely. I see this too, as a deliberate undermining of Western economies. It is not just "the proletariat" who are being squeezed, but everyone who is in business and struggling, especially those who just got started. I do agree that there are "rentier" interests particularly connected with the ownership of land, who wish to see the status quo maintained, but I disagree completely that all businessmen and employers are "exploiters"; most of them are every bit as much an assaulted target of all this as "the proletariat" themselves are.

I think Henry George said, but I agree with it whoever said it, that it is a tragedy that Trade Unions have inherently been antagonistic to those who provide employment to their workers, when in fact they BOTH sink or swim together and have a common enemy in the "rentier" class. By the way, I heartily agree with taxes being raised on land (low rates would actually raise a lot of revenue) and income taxes being kept minimal.

Sorry this is disjointed, but I think we understand each other quite well. What I am seeing more and more, is that we need a compact between the "pure" free market Right, and the honest proletariat-representing Left, by which I do NOT mean property-seizing and violent revolutionaries and anarchists. When I say I would speak in support of "illegal settlements", I mean ones in which a farmer has willingly sold his land, whether knowingly or unknowingly regarding its intended use. I do not see farmers as legitimate targets of class warfare; again, I think free markets in land and removal of protectionism and subsidies, would solve most of the "problems" for which farmers are blamed today. Rivers polluted with farm run-off, for example, would be in far better health if the surrounding area was freely urbanised.

When you say (I said this, not Hugh)

"....I find it funny Hugh that you argue for a "free market", and yet want that market regulated, because you fear the consequences. You say:

'I agree that an overnight, nationwide deregulation of urban zoning would bring about a serious economic crash in its own right. But I think that the solution needs to be enacted gradually, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, starting with small jurisdictions where incumbency is low. The ability of people to "escape" planned housing unaffordability needs to be facilitated rather than obstructed as it has been.'......"

I do not want a crash, for which "deregulation" would be blamed. I want a managed RETURN to a free market situation. I think my suggestions to this end are constructive.

I do not think your explanation for Britain's predicament as some mid-twentieth century manipulation to the end of quick money being made on development; is adequate to explain the recent international phenomenon of urban-limit-caused home unaffordability as analysed by the likes of Hugh Pavletich, Wendell Cox, Randall O'Toole, Alan Moran, Oliver Hartwich, etc.

Dear Hugh and Phil

You need not worry about group think Hugh. We disagree on what we understand freedom to mean. That is the importance of politics.

You need not worry about campaigning "undercover" Phil. audacity has never worked except in public, and in person. We've got no time for anonymity. So if developers are willing to fund Joel Kotkin and Ed Glaeser in an international event next year we'll be happy to come and argue with you.

It is a "free market" morality you preach:

'Becoming a property owner was only ever, and should be, a matter of eminently achievable hard work and thrift.'

My dead grandma told my dad when he was young that he would never get rich by rolling his own sleeves up, but that he would be starving if he didn't.

That's the freedom of capitalism for most people. The freedom to work or to starve. The freedom of capitalism for a few people is to have the capital to offer work, and pay less than the value those employees create, without which there is no profit.

On the matter of getting a house, the employer generally leaves that to the individual. Up to 1946 in Britain a hard worker could buy a plot of land and build as good a home with as little borrowing as they could manage. After 1947 that meagre freedom was made illegal as planning contained the freedom of farmers to sell plots for development. Such hard work born of necessity remains illegal. Meaning that the government effectively forces working people to borrow far more than they need for a home on the market so that those with the capital to enter the planning system negotiation over "planning gain" can employ construction workers to roll up their sleeves.

In Britain the capitalist freedom of freehold land ownnership was denied to the majority in the decades when working people were increasingly able to break free of the landlord and the mortgage lender. British capitalism had to invent planning as the denial of development rights, in clear and multi-party opposition to the "leftwing" alternative reform of the nationalisation of land, to contain the workforce.

We are not going to agree over the freedoms of capitalism. But we do agree that people should have the freedom to build cheaply on cheap land. The difference between us is that you don't seem to have worked out that such a freedom would be painful for capitalism to extend (returning to the pre-1947 freedom of land ownership in Britain) because it would collapse the financial system making additional profit not from construction, but from developable land price inflation.

Your capitalist "work ethic" is a myth, but if a thin morality leads you to argue for the universal freedom to build against planners who are supported by governments denying the workforce, then that's useful. The old distinctions of left and right have no purchase today and they had become exhausted 20 years ago.

So will you support Joel and Ed to organise an event that you can attend?

I find it funny Hugh that you argue for a "free market", and yet want that market regulated, because you fear the consequences. You say:

'I agree that an overnight, nationwide deregulation of urban zoning would bring about a serious economic crash in its own right. But I think that the solution needs to be enacted gradually, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, starting with small jurisdictions where incumbency is low. The ability of people to "escape" planned housing unaffordability needs to be facilitated rather than obstructed as it has been.'

The unaffordability is not a conspiracy. It is a predicament. It is the twenty-first century consequence of a political containment in the middle of the twentieth century, when British capitalists expected to make more money out of construction and development than mortgage lending.

... and don't worry Hugh. I'm going to post your arguments for free on audacity when I have time between the pleasures of home life and the necessity of rolling my sleeves up.

Hope you are having a happy holiday.

Ian Abley
www.audacity.org

Response to Ian.

Thank you for the considered reply.

I believe you are correct in what you say about the entrenchment of this problem. If a movement gets going along the lines you are advocating, I would speak out strongly in defense of it. I think it would be even better all round if some maverick developers (Hugh?) and capital equipment providers were in there undercover helping you.

But I believe that getting the younger generation properly informed on this issue is a vital first step. I fear that our societies are progressing towards a dangerous situation where the young are locked out of participation in what was for previous generations, a much more fair and just social arrangement; and the young are not even remotely aware of the whys and wherefores. In fact they are the main supporters of the Green mania that is the foremost problem.

I realise the situation has been much worse in Britain for much longer. But in New Zealand and Australia and many other countries where land is much more plentiful, the same thing has occurred; intergenerational wealth transfer (thanks, Robert Bruegmann) through de facto land supply racketeering. Becoming a property owner was only ever, and should be, a matter of eminently achievable hard work and thrift. Have you read Bob Day's essay on the aspect of the sustainability of a society where the young are no longer able to enjoy the same benefits regarding affordable housing, as their parents did?

http://erudito.livejournal.com/710656.html

And I quote, as this is the kernel of where I am coming from in my argument:

".......As the great British historian Paul Johnson says:
“The connection between political liberty and the individual ownership of property is one of the great certitudes of human society. It is carved in granite where the words “freedom” and “freehold” come from the same root and have interrelated with each other through many centuries.”

What I would like to do here is:
1. Outline the historical connection between private property ownership and the development of western civilization.
2. Show that modern urban planning laws and their enforcers in the various planning bureaucracies, are destroying this central institution in key jurisdictions in Western society.
3. Trace the evolution of these laws and planning bureaucracies to demonstrate their origins in socialist theory and practice.
4. Establish a link between urban planning laws and the current financial turmoil gripping the world and
5. Show how individual home ownership - private property in its most basic form, still has the power to change the world.

In his famous speech in the House of Commons in 1763, William Pitt declared:
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. His cottage may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”
Without property rights there can be no freedom.

The 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said that private property was to be defended, “with all vigour against the socialists.”

The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto observed:
“Legal property gave the West the tools to produce surplus value over and above its physical assets. Whether anyone intended it or not, the legal property system became the staircase that took these nations from the ‘universe of assets’ in their natural state to the ‘universe of capital’ where assets can be viewed in their full productive potential.”

In other words, property rights, markets and prosperity go hand in hand.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the ownership of freehold land to the progress of liberty throughout the English-speaking world........"

(END OF QUOTE).

I see a society BASED on "illegal construction" as one which cannot progress until a system of property rights comes into being, as convincingly described by Hernando DeSoto in "The Mystery of Capital". But some illegal settlements in Britain today, I would regard as a useful temporary measure to demonstrate the extent to which the problem of the land racket has developed.

But ultimately, I see property developers and financiers operating in a free market, as part of the only real solution. I see Texas and the Southern and Inland US States that have not yet succumbed to "Smart Growth", as working models of the solution. It is my firm belief that under such free markets, the "little man" is empowered to receive the maximum help at minimum cost from developers and financiers, and the power of "rentier" interests is minimised to nothing; leading to superior outcomes for the "little man", to those achievable under any other political system.

I believe that the problems of the little man's loss of power, have been progressively worsened by each leftwing government intervention to "solve" the previous problem THEY had already caused. (Boosting home ownership through further meddling, in banking and finance, rather than addressing the problem at its supply regulation source). The logical conclusion is of course, government nationalisation of land and financial institutions. Good luck to the little man under a rerun of that long since historically damned scenario.

As to the implementation of this solution given what you rightly point out as the entrenched situation with the equity of the entire financial system from the home owner upwards, I have a few ideas.

Firstly, I agree that an overnight, nationwide deregulation of urban zoning would bring about a serious economic crash in its own right. But I think that the solution needs to be enacted gradually, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, starting with small jurisdictions where incumbency is low. The ability of people to "escape" planned housing unaffordability needs to be facilitated rather than obstructed as it has been.

Owen McShane in New Zealand has written scathingly about the way limits have been imposed around small country towns, so that newbuild houses there have ceased to be an escape valve for people fleeing the unaffordable metropolitan areas. Such small towns need to be allowed to become the next high-growth, rapid-sprawling areas which over the years would develop as serious competition to existing established areas stifled by incumbency.

Next, I would say that political pressures are going to result in a relaxation of monetary policy inflation targets in the near future. I would say that a period of years of sustained high inflation would allow for incomes to catch up to property prices if property prices were "managed" through land reform at the same time.

But I am not optimistic about such solutions being put into practice anywhere anytime soon. I think we are going to have bigger and worse crashes with the causes remaining unacknowledged by our "elites", and concealed from the vast majority; and I think things will eventually be so bad that your illegal settlements (and/or mass "squatting") will become unstoppable. If the government is too weak to stop you from building anywhere you want to, one shudders to think what else they will have lost control of. They should have stuck to Defence and Law and Order in the first place.

Ian,

Your list of points above is possibly the best thing I have ever seen to succinctly describe the way urban limits affect the prices of all residential property. I would quote it extensively all over the internet if I had the time I wished I had to devote to this issue. You may have seen comments from me before.

I think you fingered the problem beautifully, in describing the Green ideology as a convenient excuse for a capital gains racket.

But I regard the Green ideology as just another new extension of the Gramscian-Fabian agenda to destroy capitalism. The fact that "capitalists" exploit it to their own temporary advantage is a bit like Lenin's comment that capitalists would sell the rope that would be used to hang them. "Capitalists" as you describe them are not necessarily supporters of "capitalism", especially as, say, Ayn Rand would define it. In fact, she was much more scathing than you could possibly be, about the "Statist Businessman".

I think you push the "not free" argument too far, and misjudge "free markets". It seems to me that what you are asking for, IS a free market in land supply, free of zoning constraints which are the very antithesis of a free market, not a component of it.

I also think you are far too pessimistic regarding the freedom of people to obtain land and homes under a true free market. Removal of the zoning restrictions would itself make land so cheap that anyone could buy it with a modicum of hard work and thrift. Look at the Demographia reports. Regions of the USA that have not been afflicted with restricted zoning, have sections for sale at well below 1 years average income.

This would become pretty much an international norm if people could, as you advocate, pay farmland prices for land to live on. Robert Shiller wrote THIS very interesting little analysis pointing this out:

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/printArticle.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=2...

The point is that there is comparatively little variation internationally, in what farmland is potentially worth. The returns on farming investments are not going to be a lot different wherever the farmland is. And there is so much more farmland than there is even potential requirement for residential land, that it is impossible for price escalation for residential land to go back to anything like unaffordable levels.

Furthermore, free markets in house construction, are all to the benefit of the potential buyer. The cheaper the land at the urban fringes, the cheaper the land in older established areas, even if it is more expensive than the fringe land due to location. I feel particularly strongly about the disappearance in many urban areas, of the cheap "shack"; simply because all the cheap shacks are now sitting on $500,000 sections not $50,000 sections, as a result of urban fringe sections being $300,000 instead of $30,000. The result is a shack worth $10,000 as a house, being sold for $510,000 instead of $60,000 - and at that, it still possessed advantages of location.

The cheap shack as it used to exist (and still does in many parts of the USA) is a genuine free market outcome, and is a strong contributor to peoples ability to achieve financial independence early in life, even on low incomes. While I disagree with your terminology about whether people are "free" or not, I think you and I (and Hugh Pavletich) are arguing for exactly the same end results even if Hugh and I call it the free market and you call it something else.

"THE DANGERS OF ALLOWING THE PURSUIT OF SOMEWHAT IMPERFECT SUSTAINABLE CARBON ZERO HOUSING AS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE IN CERTAIN 'POCKETS OF FREEDOM' THROUGHOUT THE LANDS ARE NOT NEARLY AS GREAT AS THE DANGER OF NOT PURSUING IT AT ALL."

- Michael Reynolds
Earthship Biotecture
www.earthship.com
biotecture@earthship.com

Ian: I find your approach both refreshing and convincing. I refer you to the more recent writings of William Fischel on the interests of homeowners in protecting the high values of their houses and resisting any policies that would undermine them. In fact, the historical adoption of zoning laws in the US was, as we know, in the name of the health and safety of the community. These have now been co-opted to protect home values, which really have nothing to do with their original intent. I agree with you that house price inflation only hurts those first-home buyers or renters looking for an affordable home, but helps those who already own their houses. It is in their interest to keep home values high, and it is clearly in the interest of financial institutions to keep home values high as security for their capital. There is an interesting inter-generational issue here too: the kids can no longer afford a place near their parents. However, when I ask people whether they care, it turns out that the parents don't really expect their kids to leave nearby, and that the kids look to inherit an expensive asset. As long as there are only a few kids, maybe one or two, this probably makes sense. In societies that have shrinking populations, the inter-generational issue is probably mute. It is worrisome in places where there are more kids, where a third or a fourth of an inheritance, after taxes, won't buy three or four apartments anywhere.

One of my own worries is that the environmental ‘anti-sprawl’ agenda is being exported to developing countries, where cities still need to expand several-fold in order to accommodate their projected populations. I am quoting from my forthcoming Working Paper (co-authored by Jason Parent, Daniel Civco and Alexander Blei) on the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy website:

"The justifications for urban containment and densification policies are ample and need not be repeated here. The anti-sprawl literature, from the popular to the academic, is vast and varied and we assume that the reader cannot help but be familiar with several of its representative examples. The conviction that these policies are the right strategies for our troubled times, that they are, in fact, strategies to ensure our very survival on the planet, is now widespread. Rigorous evidence that containment and compact city strategies indeed work and that their societal benefits exceed their negative side effects is rather meager, but that is almost beside the point: Political support for these measures is substantial and growing."

"The urban containment and compact city rhetoric is also spreading to cities in developing countries where its value may be more questionable. Could it be that urban containment policies are inappropriate for developing countries at the present time? Could it be that densities in developing-country cities, on the whole, are high enough? How different are they from densities in developed countries? Can authorities in developing-country cities ensure compliance with zoning and land use regulations designed to contain urban expansion? Would it not be more realistic to make room for expansion at the projected densities rather than trying to contain expansion and failing in the attempt? If so, how much land would be needed to accommodate the coming expansion given realistic projections of urban population growth and urban densities?"

Answers to these questions demand a rigorous empirical investigation and they form the core of the Working Paper, titled “the Persistent Decline in Urban Densities: Global and Historical Evidence of Sprawl”.

Finally, I especially like your insight that late capitalism centers its energy and innovation in financial engineering, not in the production of real goods and services.

In short, you make an interesting and important case.