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The Scandal of the Public Non-Profit

By | | News commentary
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This is the time of year when we think charitable thoughts about those less fortunate than ourselves and, if we can afford it, give to charities to help such people. But there are some charities that are hardly charitable.

Excerpt from IRS form 990 submitted by Mercy Housing showing amounts paid to its top staff members. Click image for a larger view.

In order to qualify for tax-deductible donations, non-profits must persuade the Internal Revenue Service that they are a charitable organization. Such organizations, says the IRS, are “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, or other specified purposes.” Continue reading →

Urban Wishful Thinking Index

By | | Transportation
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Something called the Oliver Wyman Forum has worked with the University of California, Berkeley to publish an annual “urban mobility readiness index.” This is supposed to be a measure of how ready cities are for the coming “mobility revolution.” Unfortunately, it is more a measure of how ready cities are for the nineteenth-century’s mobility revolution.

Click image to read this report.

The latest index ranks San Francisco as the best in the world when in fact it is one of the least mobile cities and urban areas in the nation. Dallas and Houston, two of the most mobile urban areas in America, are ranked 34 and 35 out of 70 major cities. Considering that Moscow, one of the most mobility-repressed cities in the world, is ranked not far below Houston, this index isn’t providing much help regarding urban mobility. Continue reading →

Highways, Amtrak, Airlines Set Records in 2024

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 2.8 percent more miles in October 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. Both urban and rural driving were greater in October 2024 than October 2019.

Meanwhile, Amtrak brags that it carried an all-time record number of passengers in its fiscal year 2024 (which ended September 30). In that year, it carried 32.8 million riders and 6.54 billion passenger-miles. That is only a small fraction of the number carried by passenger trains when they were private, as ridership peaked at 1.2 billion in 1920 and passenger-miles peaked at 89 billion in 1944. But 2024 was a record year since Amtrak began in 1971. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 77% of Pre-Covid Riders in October

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s public transit systems carried 77.3 percent as many riders in October 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the highest level transit has achieved since the beginning of the pandemic.

The increase is likely due to more people returning to downtown jobs instead of working remotely. While President Biden seems content to let many federal employees work at home, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to order them to return to work, which will create an interesting situation as the new administration takes office in January. Musk and Ramaswamy have hinted that their real goal is to get many federal employees to quit, thus relieving the president of the necessity of firing them to achieve the goal of reducing the federal budget by $2 trillion. Continue reading →

October Amtrak & Airline Riders Up 6% from 2019

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 6.2 percent more riders and almost 8 percent more passenger-miles in October of 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to the entity’s latest monthly performance report. The airlines, meanwhile, carried 5.9 percent more passengers, according to TSA passenger counts.

October transit and highway data will be posted here when it is released by the Department of Transportation.

Although growth in air travel did not quite equal growth in rail travel, airlines still carried 25 times as many passengers and far more passenger-miles than Amtrak. While October airline passenger-miles won’t be available for a month or so, in August domestic airlines carried 110 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. When international air travel is included, airlines carried 226 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. Continue reading →

Living the Dream in Someone’s Spare Bedroom

By | | Housing
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Urban journalist Henry Grabar thinks he has found “one solution to America’s housing crisis”: convincing boomers to rent out their spare bedrooms to Gen-Zers. According to one review of census data, he says, the U.S. has 137 million spare bedrooms, more than enough to house all of the people now looking for affordable housing. Apparently, Grabar thinks that every child in America dreams of growing up to move out of their parents’ spare bedroom and into some stranger’s spare bedroom.

Photo by Curtis Adams.

I have bad news for Grabar: all of those spare bedrooms are being used. Just because they are called “bedrooms” doesn’t mean that’s their only possible use. They are home offices, libraries, dens, sewing rooms, hobby centers, home theaters, and so forth. Some of them are even used as guest bedrooms. It is rather arrogant of Grabar and others to think that, just because census data calls something a “bedroom” means that is the only use of the room. Even if those rooms were truly vacant doesn’t mean that anyone really wants to spend their lives in someone else’s spare bedroom. Continue reading →

Memo to Musk: Here’s $37 Billion in Spending Cuts

By | | News commentary
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Before the election, Elon Musk said he could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts. After the election, he scaled that back to $0.5 trillion. Now that interest alone on the national debt is exceeding $1 trillion a year, a half-trillion cut isn’t going to be enough. Here are a few ways the federal government could save billions of dollars a year.

  1. End affordable housing programs. Research has shown that these programs, led by low-income housing tax credits, mainly benefit developers, not people who can’t afford housing. This is partly because they don’t significantly increase housing supply because, researchers have found, for every five subsidized housing units built, developers build four fewer non-subsidized units. As a result, and contrary to popular belief, these programs do nothing to improve overall housing affordability. Affordable housing programs have become particularly inefficient in recent years as spending on low-income housing has doubled even as the number of units built each year has declined. Savings: At least $11 billion a year.

    2. Continue reading →

Ore. Housing Demand Down But So Is Affordability

By | | Housing
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Nearly two years ago, Oregon’s Governor Tina Kotek set a target of increasing the number of homes built in Oregon each year from 22,000 to 36,000. At the time, I argued that the subsidies Kotek was proposing wouldn’t work, partly because builders would respond to new subsidized homes by reducing market-rate home construction.

Click image to download a 3.4-MB PDF of this report.

A recent report from the state’s office of Housing and Community Services finds that the situation is worse than I thought. The state and local governments have spent $2.2 billion subsidizing new housing, mostly since 2020. Yet the most recent data indicate that the number of new homes constructed each year is no greater than it was before. Although demand for housing has fallen because so many people are leaving the state due to high housing prices, housing is considerably less affordable today than it was in 2020. Continue reading →

Amtrak Ridership Up in September

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 4.8 percent more riders and 3.5 percent more passenger-miles in September 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to the September monthly performance report that it posted yesterday. For Amtrak’s fiscal year, which ended September 30, it carried 0.8 percent more riders and 0.9 percent more passenger-miles than in F.Y. 2019.

Amtrak earned $2.5 billion in ticket revenues and food & beverage sales in F.Y. 2024. That works out to about 38.4¢ per passenger-mile. For comparison, commercial airline fares averaged 20.1¢ per passenger-mile in 2023. Continue reading →

SF Muni Tries Washington Monument Strategy

By | | Transportation
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Like many transit agencies, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) is facing a big budget deficit, and its response is to employ the Washington Monument Strategy. For those who don’t know, back in 1969 President Nixon tried to reduce the National Park Service’s budget and the Park Service responded by shutting down the Washington Monument. Tourists who wanted to ride the elevator to the top of the monument were directed to the senate and house office buildings and told to ask their elected representatives to restore the agency’s budget. Congress restored the funding, but Nixon fired the Park Service director who thought up the strategy a few years later.

Photo by Pi.1415926535.

We may need to rename this the Cable Car Strategy, as Muni is proposing to reduce its deficit by suspending service on the cable car routes as well as some streetcar routes that are mainly used by tourists. While it’s true that cable car ridership has been slow to recover from the pandemic — as of September, it was less than 69 percent of 2019 numbers — it’s also true that cable cars are the symbol of the city and an important tourist attraction. Considering all the bad publicity San Francisco has received lately, its commercial interests don’t want to do anything to depress tourism still further. Continue reading →