Michael Manville

Beyond the Spatial Mismatch: Welfare Recipients and Transportation Policy

Beneath the broad umbrella of agreement about transportation’s relationship to poverty is considerable discord about the specific nature of the problem and about where and how transportation solutions should be applied. Much of the existing scholarship on this topic focuses on the spatial mismatch hypothesis, the geographic separation between employment and housing. Although this concept has merit, to meet the transportation needs of welfare recipients, policy makers must move beyond conventional notions of the spatial mismatch hypothesis. This article draws from theoretical and empirical scholarship on travel behavior, transportation infrastructure, poverty, gender studies, and residential segregation and recommends transportation policies to better connect welfare recipients to employment.

Emerging Planning Challenges in Retail: The Case of Wal-Mart

Abstract The future growth of the worlds largest company hinges on its “supercenter” format, a bold evolution that made it the nations largest grocer in a few short years. While proposals for big-box retail have long involved politically sensitive tradeoffs for planners, supercenters bring these into sharp focus by concentrating substantial wage impacts on one group, grocery workers. With much at stake—we estimate direct impacts of hundreds of millions of dollars on each side in the San Francisco region alone—these battles promise to be more intense and challenging than in the past. Yet many regulatory strategies are weakly rationalized, poorly targeted, and legally untested. We clarify key policy questions and offer a case study as a model for understanding the extent and character of expected tradeoffs between winners and losers. In the end, our analysis supports planning strategies explicitly aimed at mitigating costs while leveraging benefits. This will require a thorough assessment of each proposed stores costs and benefits in order to provide a clearer rationale for when super-centers should be approved, denied, or mitigated. Such an approach permits planners to do what they do best: inform, mediate, and resolve.

The Price Doesn’t Matter If You Don’t Have to Pay Legal Exemptions and Market-Priced Parking

Congestion pricing is an effective way to combat congestion, and market prices for curb parking are an appealing way to implement pricing, because paying to park is more politically acceptable than paying to drive. But pricing is effective only if users have to pay, and market-priced parking is vulnerable to nonpayment. To illustrate this problem, we survey parking meters in Los Angeles. We focus on legal nonpayment, and show that almost 40 percent of vehicles at meters are both not paying and not breaking any laws. The majority of nonpayment comes from vehicles displaying disabled credentials. These credentials undermine the effectiveness of priced parking and appear to invite substantial fraud.

The Social and Fiscal Consequences of Urban Decline: Evidence from Large American Cities, 1980–2010:

We examine the fiscal consequences of sustained population loss in American cities. We find the starkest difference between growing and declining cities in their levels of social and economic distress: Declining cities have higher rates of poverty and crime. Our evidence also suggests that shrinking cities have less fiscal capacity than growing cities, although this relationship is complicated by an apparent nonlinearity: Shrinking and rapidly growing cities both have less fiscal capacity than high-demand cities that grow slowly. Lastly, both high distress and low fiscal capacity appear to predict further population loss. Together, our evidence suggests that population loss may both increase social problems and decrease the resources available to solve them, and that declining cities may enter vicious cycles that perpetuate further decline.

Motivations for Growth Revolts: Discretion and Pretext as Sources of Development Conflict

This article suggests that “ballot box growth revolts”—instances where citizens use direct democracy to curb development—may be caused by local governments’ use of discretionary development approvals. We further suggest that growth revolts themselves provide a useful window into discretionary approvals, and illustrate how discretion can create conflict. Discretion is appealing to fiscally constrained cities because it lets them bargain with developers over building permissions, and thus helps cities finance public amenities. But it also gives cities incentives to regulate more heavily than they otherwise might, and to regulate pretextually: to write rules primarily for the purpose of bargaining them away. In sum, zonings increasing use as a tool of fiscal policy can undermine its traditional role of providing assurance about future land use policy. We use various examples to illustrate our argument, including five growth revolts in Southern California.

Transit in the 2000s: Where Does It Stand and Where Is It Headed?

U.S. public transit has experienced something of a renaissance in the 2000s, with per capita service levels increasing nationwide and public investment growing even faster—particularly expenditures on rail transit. Despite this expansion, overall transit patronage has been relatively flat, and has declined significantly since 2014. What is behind these trends, and what do they portend for the future of transit? In this paper we consider three challenges shaping transit today and in the years ahead: (1) the asymmetry of transit supply and use make it especially vulnerable to changes and disruptions; (2) many of the factors that determine transit ridership, such as levels of private vehicle ownership and use, are largely beyond the control of transit agencies; and (3) there remains no consensus about what purpose transit should serve—politically the industry thrives on the idea that it will reduce congestion or clean the air, while in practice it primarily moves poor people, a very different and sometimes conflicting role. How successfully transit systems manage each of these challenges will shape their future roles and significance.

Comment on Talen et al. (2015)

Emily Talen and her coauthors (2015) show that APA Great Neighborhoods have sound urban design but are also relatively expensive and homogenous. This result appears to hold across both space and ti...