I don't know anything about Bend, but speaking generally ...
There are many ways that markets are inefficient and flawed; I wouldn't assume they would yield a good result. For example, the barbershops may be incentivized to push the parking costs onto others. It may be that every business has that incentive, nobody wants to pay for other people's parking, and thus nobody makes the first move. In situations like that, people succeed by coordinating their activities through democratic government and laws.
People living in cities, elbow-to-elbow and sharing large numbers of resources (such as parking), may need to coordinate more than people in rural areas.
Also, as they say, don't tear down a fence until you know the reason for which it was built. It's like that odd, useless-looking bit of code in that old application - maybe do some research before you delete it.
Realistically speaking, the barber shop could only really push people to park:
* On the street. And you know what? That's fine. If the street was built to have parking, and people are parking there, it's not a problem. It might be more of a PITA for the clients. If it's too much of a PITA, the business may suffer. But that's how markets work.
* In some other business' parking spots: that can easily be solved by other means, rather than having city-wide laws covering all barbers in the city, some of which may cater to hipsters riding fixies who do not need car parking, and others who have elderly patrons who will not tolerate being forced to walk more than they absolutely have to.
I'm not a "markets solve all the problems kind of guy" because externalities are real things. But I feel that our cities are way too regulated. Zoning didn't even exist in Bend until 1947. Some of the first zoning regulations didn't come about until the early 20th century in the rest of the US.
How would we react if there were a "planning commission" that dictated how much of each kind of restaurant (Vietnamese, Mexican, Burgers, etc..) at what kind of price point could exist in a city? Zoning should be to keep truly noxious things away from where people live, not to keep duplexes away from single family homes, or barber shops outside of residential areas.
Maybe there aren't enough street parking spots for all the businesses, and then the market fails: No business wants to spend on on-site parking in order to free up parking for everyone else. The way to move forward is to come together and pass a law.
> Zoning didn't even exist in Bend until 1947. Some of the first zoning regulations didn't come about until the early 20th century in the rest of the US.
I'm not sure that means anything either way. Baseball didn't become desegregated until 1947 either. Is there something suspect about advances or changes in society that are recent? Did humans live better before 1947?
> I feel that our cities are way too regulated.
With due respect, this is too easy to say without evidence, is too general to have much application, and it has become cliche to say it about everything. In what ways are they too regulated, and in what ways not regulated enough? Do you have anything to back it up? How much regulation is just right?
> How would we react if there were a "planning commission" that dictated how much of each kind of restaurant (Vietnamese, Mexican, Burgers, etc..) at what kind of price point could exist in a city?
Vote them out of office? Appear at the planning commission meeting? Organize restaurant owners and talk to elected representatives? Democracy is a proven, effective tool. Case in point: I haven't heard of your hypothetical extreme scenario happening.
When I was born, Bend was still a wood products industry town based around logging and the local mills. These days, it's trying to develop a high tech industry, and doing reasonably well at it for a small-ish town. Places need to adapt, and rigid zoning is probably detrimental to that adaptation. Markets take in everyone who lives, or wants to live in a place. Planning commissions, or even city councils, have just a few people with their own ideas of "how things should be".
In terms of how they're too regulated, sure:
http://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/06/shut-out-how-land-use-r...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/04/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/10/why-c...
And Exhibit A: the market for housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is completely batshit crazy because of the refusal to build housing.
Or it could be parking is a low value land use and little parking is truly optimum. Oftentimes when streets are closed to car traffic permanently there's a boost to business in dense cities.
Many cities don't have parking minimums and they have minimal parking but yet function well. Manhattan for instance is like that.
I lived in Japan and I don't think auto centric Okinawa where I lived had Parking minimums. It had less parking, but from what I recall more private paid lots and higher utilization (no seas of unused parking because a random bureaucrat decided malls needed exactly 2.5 spaces per 1000 square feet).
>Did humans live better before 1947?
In some ways, yes. There were obviously planning failures, but mostly zoning was put in place to exclude the poor and minorities without passing an explicit ban. Just build a place they can never afford and it'll be all great, or so they thought.
IIRC a majority of wealth inequality is due to housing costs. These zoning laws prop up the cost of housing and make it more and more difficult for the young to buy.
Used to be you'd have like a 5 or 10 year loan to buy a house, which might cost 3x the average salary. Not anymore.
>Do you have anything to back it up?
You can compare US zoning with that of other nations and compare cost of housing, transportation, and other metrics.
I think you'll find that on many metrics we do quite poorly.
Also: mobility is decreasing as the cost of housing has increased, which in turn has GDP growth ramifications as workers cannot seek out the highest paying jobs.
This is why some countries like Japan handle zoning at the national level.
>Vote them out of office
Good thing in many cities these planning guys are unelected. Voting out, say, the mayor or city councilman is also ineffective as a majority would be needed.
Incentive wise it's in each district's best interest to ban new housing as that gives land owners more and more money as the population rises and chases the same housing stock.
Add in rent control and rent stabilization and a slim majority are incentivized to keep things as they are.
>Democracy is a proven, effective tool.
Democracy is effective at not rounding up dissidents in secret police raids, but in cases like this it breaks down. Zoning acts as a ban on people, and those people can never become voters, thus perpetuating the system.
Choosing the voters is almost as good as not having a vote at all.
I like to remind budding conservatives and libertarians that the free market is an ideal, not a mandate. The situation you describe is one that it perfect to be handled by the market. It's a cliche but it's also true that what matters is "Location, Location, Location". If you locate a business in an area where the people who would normally patronize it do not often travel or where they can't obtain adequate parking, that business will suffer.
That's a bizarre thing to say.
Construction in the suburbs is far more tightly regulated in the suburbs than in the city.
You could easily get the same thing out of a HOA in a city with fewer city-wide rules and regulations.
But that doesn't resolve the question of the supply of parking spaces - i.e., how many there should be. That only allocates the existing ones.
Also, it allocates them to those who can pay more; that's not always desirable. For example, should citizens' access to the grocery store be limited by their ability to pay for parking? To city hall?
You mean others who post "Parking for McDonald's only" on their spots and have a towing service visible?
There are problems that are not pragmatic for markets to solve without a bit of legal rigidity, but the whole "who will build the roads?" seems to stem from a lack of creativity and just overall contrarianism. "Who will build the interstate highway system" is a much more fair question, but I think cities would enjoy a nice efficiency boost from the decentralized, organic growth of a less bureaucratically-planned city (plus fewer budget problems).
Surely you mean the taxpayer? Isn't that what the whole article is about? They're going bankrupt by preventing businesses from doing "annoying crap" like buying/constructing parking places and reserving them for their OWN customers. But perhaps bankruptcy is not such a terrible price to pay for aesthetics and bureaucratically instituted uniformity.
Consider the infrastructure costs in the article: Less centralized, less planned cities would, I expect, create higher infrastructure costs as efficiencies of scale, standardization, reduced redundancy, and planning would be lost. Also, different parts of the city would try to dump costs on each other.
As I asked in another comment:
In what ways are they too regulated, and in what ways not regulated enough? ... How much regulation is just right? And: To which cities are you referring? What kinds of cities?
It's too easy to say, 'there's too much regulation'; it's cliche and doesn't really mean anything.
Sounds like pure speculation. Economies of scale is a real phenomenon, but you should be aware that diseconomies of scale is also a real phenomenon that tends to manifest most clearly in government bureaucracies (and in fact, does, per the example in the article).
There is no logical reason to be a naysayer without introducing solutions of your own when the current system is clearly not working (either in terms of results OR financial sustainability). Many companies adopt informal policies like "if you complain, you need to provide a solution of your own." I'm complaining, and I propose decentralizing road building and providing incentives to make it practical for companies to develop them freely (no property taxes on roads open to the public, for example), and a reduction in zoning by city governments in the first place. Prove me wrong and provide a better solution, and I'll be thrilled. I am certainly not an expert on this subject. But I hope you don't think what we have is working -- almost every city in the US is on a practically irreversible path to bankruptcy.
Isn't this just local city government with another name? Well, no. There are significant differences between a city government and an organization of private citizens. For one, it's illegal for Walmart to bribe voters; but a corporation would love to have Walmart 'bribe' its shareholders.
Since I assume the land value of neatly organized sections is higher than that of poorly organized sections, there would be an entire section of the economy that buys up individual plots of land, forms corporations out of them, and redevelops and resells the area.
Also, a common and essential part of the free market is failure and bankruptcy. What happens when parts of the city go bankrupt? What happens to the citizens there? What happens to the debt?
I'm not suggesting to remove the city; just a way of re-implementing land-use and building codes if a city doesn't handle it. Probably you'd want fire codes and limited zoning for polluting heavy manufacturing to be handled by the city no matter what; though lawsuits and insurance could cover in a pinch.
