Is that a Skyscraper in Your Beltway...

All due apologies for the brief hiatus.

This week's idiosyn.cranomicx hat-tip goes to V. Dion Haynes, writing for the Post. His point's a simple one: height restrictions in zoning codes tend to encourage sprawl. Massively. The example he gives is the D.C. area (a region experiencing some of extremest sprawl in the States). No other American metropolis limits the height of its buildings so strictly. And as a logical consequence of that, D.C. builds outwards. Density becomes impossible, and so the dizzying diffusion of suburbia becomes the only other choice.

But Matthew Yglesias is a smarter guy than I am, so I'll let him explain the details.

My quirky contribution is simply this: let's say you have a height restriction. But add a twist: make the town like Dubuque, a modest one where demand would have never driven development skyward in the first place. Would that height restriction (on its own accord) have altered growth patterns anyway? I would argue yes. By capping height at, say, 30 stories, you change everyone's expectations. You guarantee the continued viability of commuting, for example, because there'd never be an impenetrable urban core to choke it. (Density would be capped inasmuch as 30-story buildings can only hold so many people. Retail would spread out accordingly, fearing market saturation among inner-city competitors. Etc.) And that means you'd artificially inflate property values at the periphery because you'd reduce the risk of a commuter-hostile core. You'd also have homebuyers cueing off the retail sector by using it as a predictor of future growth, making peripheral properties seem like the best investments. And at that point, you'd get a vicious cycle. The second generation of businesses would follow homebuyers, and homebuyers would follow businesses, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

And it'd all be precipitated because of an ordinance that shouldn't have mattered anyway! Food for thought, at least.