Anthony Downs

Anthony Downs, born in 1930 and died in 2021, was a researcher at the Brookings Institution for more than forty years and one of the most influential economists in American urban policy. His doctoral thesis at Stanford, published in 1957 as An Economic Theory of Democracy, founded public choice by applying economic analysis to voting and parties, and his idea of the rationally ignorant voter remains a reference in political science.

For the city, his decisive contribution was the fundamental law of highway congestion, formulated in a 1962 article and developed in Stuck in Traffic (1992) and Still Stuck in Traffic (2004): at peak hours, traffic grows to fill all available capacity, because every new lane attracts, through triple convergence, drivers who previously travelled by other routes, at other times or by other modes. Widening roads does not remove congestion; it only postpones it. Duranton and Turner confirmed it with data in 2011.

Downs was also an early advocate of opening the suburbs to poor and Black residents, in Opening Up the Suburbs (1973), and an analyst of housing, land and metropolitan growth in New Visions for Metropolitan America (1994). He wrote for presidents of both parties, and his conclusion on traffic, that congestion is the inevitable price of a prosperous city and that only pricing road use moderates it, remains uncomfortable for everyone.

In Neighborhoods and Urban Development (1981) he described the neighbourhood life cycle: a sequence of stages, from stable and viable to minor, clear and heavy decline and finally abandonment, which depends less on the buildings than on the expectations of owners, banks and residents. When everyone expects a neighbourhood to get worse, they stop investing and the prophecy fulfils itself. Downs argued that public policy should act in the early stages, while changing expectations is still cheap.