Gordon Brown, the U.K. prime minister, is preparing to order local governments to expand the amount of land available for development so as to alleviate that nation’s high housing prices. Although the media presents this as a conflict between “the environment” and affordable housing, it is in fact a conflict between an elite’s desire to preserve rural open space vs. a working-class desire for decent housing.
Wendell Cox’s survey of housing prices found that the U.K. had some of the least-affordable housing in the English-speaking world. Unlike Canada and the U.S., which both have some unaffordable areas and others that are affordable, virtually all of the U.K. is unaffordable.
Urban-growth boundaries can trace their origin to Queen Elizabeth I, who in 1580 ordered her people to “desist and forbear” any new construction within three miles of the gates of London. The U.K.’s Town & Country Planning Act of 1947, probably qualifies as the world’s first modern smart-growth law.
One of the things that make the Antiplanner see red is whenever anyone talks about the need for government to help create a “sense of community.” John Gardner, of Common Cause, thinks of government “as a critical partner in” restoring a sense of community, and particularly would like to see more federal involvement.
As noted here last week, David Brooks thinks the infrastructure stimulus bill can build a sense of community by helping to “create suburban town squares.” Architect/planners like Andres Duany think their designs create a sense of community for the people who live in them.
The company that tried to sell “Diesel multiple units” to the nation’s transit industry is officially out of business. The company’s bumpy history was noted here a couple of weeks ago.
In retrospect, it is hard to believe that a railcar manufacturer could have failed after a more than a decade in which the transit industry furiously spent well over a hundred billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money on various rail transit schemes. This is especially so considering that RTD, Colorado Railcar’s “hometown agency,” ordered a record-breaking $187 million worth of light-rail cars from Siemens. But Colorado Railcar only managed to sell its product to two different transit agencies, one in Florida and one in Oregon.
Today is the Antiplanner’s second anniversary, and to express my appreciation to everyone who reads and comments, I am offering another gift. A few weeks ago, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight posted the third quarter home price indices for states and metropolitan areas.
These data are, in my opinion, much better than the more-frequently cited Case-Schiller index, which covers a much more limited set of cities and states. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight uses the Case-Schiller method of comparing same-home resales, but applies it to every state and metro area in the country.
I’ve enhanced these files by adding a few basic calculations and charts. The original data are still in columns A through E of the spreadsheets. In column F (in every 134th and 135th row), I’ve calculated the percentage by which housing prices increased after the first quarter of 2000 to their peak and the percentage by which prices declined after their peak.
David Brooks writes that suburban growth in the 1980s and 1990s “overshot the mark.” People moved further out from urban centers than they really wanted to, and as a result ended up “missing community and social bonds.” “If you ask people today what they want,” he says, “they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers” than suburban golf courses.
How does he know? How many people has he talked to? What data does he have to support this? If it is true, I don’t have any problem with it, but I don’t want to see people make policy based on New Urbanist fantasies and speculations.
The actual numbers show that some people are moving downtown (often supported by local subsidies), but the suburbs are still growing far faster. Sociological analyses find that people in the suburbs have more social ties, not less, than people in central cities, so the whole “sense of community” argument stinks.
An Oxford physicist claims he can trace individual “extreme weather events” to climate change, thereby allowing people to sue the corporations that are the biggest greenhouse gas contributors for the damage caused in those events. An attorney for Native Americans has already filed such a lawsuit in the name of Alaska villagers who might actually have to live on land instead of ice if the permafrost melts.
Of course, if you want to find those really responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, don’t blame the corporations: look in the mirror.
On the other hand, some people remain unconvinced that anthropogenic climate change is real. What if they are right? Can corporations sue environmental groups for any costs they have imposed on them in a wasted effort to reduce emissions?
Or at least some of it has. Environmentalists are now paying timber companies to stay in business. What?
Apparently, environmental groups have decided that, though they hate clearcutting, they hate urban sprawl even more. So they are willing to subsidize timber companies to keep cutting timber so they don’t want to subdivide their property.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Antiplanner was working as a forestry consultant to the Sierra Club and other major environmental groups, environmentalists hated timber companies because they replaced natural, diverse forests with monocultures.
“Timber companies practice selective logging,” the always-quotable Andy Kerr liked to say: “they select a watershed, and then they log it.” Industry forests were not true monocultures like corn fields, but the were a lot less diverse — in both ages of trees and numbers of species — than natural forests.
Best wishes from Chip, his niece Buffy, the Antiplanner, and the Antiplanner’s friend, Vickie. Plus, I have a little holiday present for you.
The Federal Highway Administration has started to publish its 2007 Highway Statistics. These include a couple of tables that contain lots of useful data about urban areas, but the tables are annoyingly difficult to work with.
The tables are HM-71, which lists miles of road and daily vehicle miles traveled for various kinds of roads in each of more 458 urban areas; and HM-72, which lists other important characteristics for each of those urban areas.
I have two problems with the FHwA’s Excel files. First, it puts the 458 urban areas on nine different sheets, or about 50 urban areas per sheet. So I make a new file that puts them all on one sheet. Second, for those urban areas that are in multiple states, it breaks down the data by state. This can be useful, but if you are trying to get totals, averages, or do other calculations, you effectively double-count those areas. So I delete the state-by-state breakdowns.
The result are modified tables HM-71 and HM-72. If you find these modified tables useful, they are my Christmas gift to you. Perhaps not as big a gift as my Thanksgiving gift, but that’s the way the holiday cookie crumbles.
The Antiplanner doesn’t go to movies often, preferring to wait until the DVDs come out. So until last week all I had seen of the Dark Knight were the trailers. I was particularly intrigued to hear the Joker say, “It’s all part of the plan.”
The good and evil antiplanners.
Now that I’ve seen the movie, I understand why people have suggested that the late Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar nomination. His portrayal of the Joker really carried the show. But the trailer took his planning statement out of context.
