The Antiplanner

Tualatin, a distant suburb of Portland, is the proud owner of three large and expensive bells that may never toll (there were supposed to be four, but one was stolen). The bells were purchased with TIF (tax-increment finance) money as a part of a $12 million subsidy to Tualatin Commons, a New Urbanist development. But the city ran out of subsidy before it could build a tower for the bells.

A proposal to extend the urban-renewal district for another 25 years, which would have provided the millions needed for a bell tower and other inane projects, was killed when the local fire district objected to the loss of its tax revenues and other taxpayers agreed that the project was frivolous. But the city had already bought the bells for $150,000 (which includes architectural drawings for the bell tower), so now it is stuck with four brass elephants.

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Speaking of crony capitalism (as the Antiplanner was doing last week), one of the biggest sources of such urban corruption is tax-increment financing (TIF). TIF was invented in the 1950s to help cities revitalize neighborhoods that were supposedly so blighted that no one would gentrify them without government support. Today, such blight (which resulted when people left high-density inner cities for low-density suburbs) is mostly a thing of the past.

Urban planners use TIF to promote their social agendas, most recently favoring high-density, mixed-use developments (which is ironic since TIF was originally used to clear such developments that no one wanted). City managers see TIF as a way of boosting their budgets at the expense of schools and other entities that they see as competitors for the limited amount of tax dollars that property tax payers (and, in some states, sales tax payers) are willing to cough up. Mayors and city councilors see TIF as a way of rewarding developers who contributed to their political campaigns, which is where the crony capitalism comes in.

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TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is planning to spend $7 million upgrading the 24-year-old Rockwood station in the city of Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. TriMet officials hope the improvements will “leverage investment in transit into nearby development opportunities” in that neighborhood. Fat chance, especially since it was the light rail that killed the neighborhood in the first place.

The Rockwood Fred Meyer in 2000. Note the light-rail train in the background.

For 45 years, the center of the Rockwood neighborhood was a Fred Meyer store, a “supercenter” selling groceries, clothing, variety, and hardware. Fred Meyer also leased storefronts to other businesses such as coffee shops and locksmiths. When Fred Meyer spent $400,000 remodeling the store after TriMet opened the light-rail line in 1986, TriMet triumphantly counted it as an investment inspired by the light rail. Never mind the fact that Fred Meyer bragged on its web site that it had remodeled all of its 130 stores at about the same time.

The truth was, things were not going well at the Rockwood store. In January 2003, Fred Meyer shocked the neighborhood by closing it even though it was obligated to pay a lease on the site for another 10 years. The store “was in decline for a number of years,” a Fred Meyer official told the Oregonian (article available to those with access to Infoweb). “It was in a decline before the last remodel.” This was the only time in the chain’s history that it closed a store without immediately reopening a replacement nearby.

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Sigh. Another day, another junk science paper from the smart-growth advocates. This time it is a paper titled Walking the Walk, which argues that the fact that housing prices are higher in so-called walkable neighborhoods proves that “consumers and housing markets attach a positive value to living within easy walking distance of shopping, services, schools and parks.”

In fact, all the paper proves is that the person who wrote it doesn’t understand basic economics. The report is junk science because it confuses cost with demand and presumes that correlation equals causation.

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Ask progressives what they think is the nation’s most-progressive city, and many are likely to mention San Francisco. Not coincidentally, the progressive SF Weekly argues that San Francisco is also the nation’s worst-managed city.

Welcome to San Francisco, where per capita budgets climb halfway to the stars.

The city spends more than $8,000 per capita, compared with less than $7,200 by New York and less than $3,000 by Philadelphia and Denver. The Weekly suggests that most of the difference is waste. (In San Francisco’s defense, San Francisco is a combined city-county government and its budget includes a lot of services, such as public transit, not included in Philadelphia or Denver budgets.)

Still, “even other liberal places wouldn’t put up with the degree of dysfunction they have in San Francisco,” says faithful Antiplanner ally Joel Kotkin. “In Houston” — which both Kotkin and the Antiplanner admire — “I assume you’d get shot” if you did so poorly.

There are a lot of problems with the city, but one of the biggest is public employees unions. Unions were probably important in providing workers with a balance against large corporations. But the potential corruption of unions with the dysfunction of government is a recipe for disaster.

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The Antiplanner is increasingly convinced that most believers in anthropomorphic climate change care less about saving the planet than they do about changing people’s behavior. Climate change is just an excuse for using the power of government to force such changes.

We can see this in the city of Portland’s Climate Action Plan, which is all about changing behavior. The plan aims to reduce per capita electricity usage by 25 percent and per capita driving by an unbelievable two-thirds by 2050.

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A story caught my eye that the state of Oregon is giving “$70.5 million in loans and tax credits to contractors throughout the state that will help fund 444 units of affordable housing.” That’s almost $159,000 per “unit.”

Portland’s Uptown Tower received $128,000 in subsidies per housing unit.

The article doesn’t say how much is tax credits and how much is loans, but a news release from Oregon Housing and Community Services indicates it is mostly tax credits and grants. The total funds listed in the press release fall short of $70.5 million, but the grants and tax credits provided to individual projects often exceeded $100,000 per home.

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It is hard not to gloat over the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s infamous Kelo decision. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out recently, the city of New London, Connecticut spent $78 million condemning people’s homes and bulldozing them away, and the development that was supposed to happen in that area has flopped and looks like it may never take place. (With the help of many supporters, Kelo’s own home was disassembled and moved to a new location.)

Pfizer, the company whose “world-class” research and development offices were driving New London’s plan for condos and other trendy developments, recently merged with another company and has announced it is moving out of New London. As a result, even after the economy recovers, the development that New London wanted to put on Susette Kelo’s neighborhood will probably never happen.

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book, “may still be the most indispensible volume in any urbanist’s library.” At least that what urban economist Edward Glaeser writes in a recent issue of The New Republic.

Glaeser’s article is actually a defense of Jacobs’ nemesis, Robert Moses. But the Antiplanner has to say that Jacobs in general and The Death and Life in particular are highly overrated.

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The Congress for the New Urbanism is holding its annual convention, which means it is time once again for the New York Times to get suckered into publishing a story about how rail transit spurs development. The Antiplanner calls bullshit on that.

The article opens with a heartwarming tale of how light rail turned a dusty cow town in Texas into a thriving, New Urban community. Naturally, the writer never mentions the tax-increment financing that supported this redevelopment.

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