Taner Osman

On Specialization, Divergence and Evolution: A Brief Response to Ron Martin’s Review

MICHAEL STORPER†‡, THOMAS KEMENY§, NAJI P. MAKAREM¶ and TANER OSMAN‡ †Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics (LSE), London, UK. Email: m.storper@lse.ac.uk ‡Department of Urban Planning, Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Email: n.makarem@ucl.ac.uk §Department of Geography and Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. Email: tomkemeny@gmail.com ¶Development PlanningUnit, The Bartlett School, UniversityCollege London (UCL), London,UK.Email: n.makarem@ucl.ac.uk

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.

Does traffic congestion influence the location of new business establishments? An analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area:

Chronic traffic congestion is widely assumed to negatively affect regional economic performance, but this assumption has been only lightly tested. We examine the traffic congestion–economic performance link using data for the San Francisco Bay Area and find that the effect of traffic on the regional economy may be both less significant and more nuanced than is widely assumed. Our analysis examines how traffic congestion affects the location of new business establishments in six industries: advertising, biotechnology, computer systems design, information technology manufacturing, securities, and, as a control, groceries & supermarkets. New business establishments are a key driver of economic performance because they account for the majority of job creation in the USA. We find little evidence that traffic levels affect the location of new establishments in the Bay Area, and when we do observe an effect it is a positive one; that is, after controlling for a wide array of factors known to influence firm location, new firms are often more likely to start up in already congested areas. This does not mean that traffic congestion attracts new firms, but instead that the access advantages new firms accrue from clustering near same-industry firms strongly outweigh the added impedance of traffic congestion in these built-up areas of agglomeration.