Densification Was a Communist Plot

Can there be any doubt that one of the reasons why the U.S.S.R. favored high-density apartment buildings for everyone in the Ideal Communist City is that it would be easier to bomb them if ever anyone tried to revolt? And one of the reasons why the communists favored mass transit over private automobiles is that it would be more difficult for people to escape such attacks?

Soviet-style apartment in Mariupol after Russian bombardment has damaged most of them. YouTube video by SkyNews.

After 9/11, we were warned by World War II historian Stephen Ambrose:” Don’t bunch up.” Yet urban planners in the United States, supported by fellow travelers in the Cato Institute and Mercatus Center, successfully persuaded the California legislature to pass laws that will make that state’s urban areas, already the densest in the nation, even denser. The people supporting these laws either have no understanding of history or are deliberately trying to make America more vulnerable to its enemies, or at least easier to control from the top down. Continue reading

Census Data Confirm Migration from Big Cities

Eight of the ten American cities with more than one million people lost population in 2020, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau. Note that these are only estimates; not official 2020 census numbers.

Seattle grew in 2020 despite having more than 7,000 people per square mile, but most American cities that dense or denser lost population.

The two exceptions, Phoenix and San Antonio, both have fewer than 3,000 people per square mile, while the cities that lost population all had densities more than 3,000 people per square mile, and most were well over 5,000. (We don’t yet have accurate 2020 densities, so I’m using densities from the 2010 census.) Continue reading

How San Jose Held Up Google for $200 Million

Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading

Don’t Be Like [Insert City Name Here]

Emily Badger, who is fast becoming the Antiplanner’s favorite writer at the New York Times, has an article this week about how cities are trying not to be like certain other cities. Seattle doesn’t want to be like San Francisco; San Francisco doesn’t want to be like Manhattan. Kansas City doesn’t want to be like Denver.

“You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted),” says Badger. Too bad she had to spoil it by including Houston, which (as she pointed out in a previous article) many people think is the model other big cities should follow.

Part of the problem is that people just don’t like big cities. The same Gallup poll that found that more Americans of all age groups would rather live in rural areas than big cities also found that more Americans of all age classes would rather live in a suburb of a big city than in a big city itself, and that more Americans of all age classes except 18-29 year olds would rather live in a small town than a big city (and among 18-29 year olds the difference was only 1 percent). People dislike big cities because they tend to be more congested, impersonal, and crime-ridden than small cities or suburbs. Continue reading

Seattle About to Implode

As the Antiplanner noted last week, Seattle is the only major city whose transit ridership grew in 2017 because the city has concentrated nearly 300,000 jobs in its downtown area. Yet, as noted earlier this week, Seattle transit ridership is starting to decline. That decline may may rapidly accelerate if the city council approves a proposed so-called “head tax” on all businesses that earn more than $20 million a year, which basically means Amazon and a few other companies.

The proposed tax would charge employers 26 cents per hour that each employee works in the city, or about $500 per full-time employee per year. For Amazon, which has something like 40,000 jobs in Seattle, the tax would amount to around $20 million a year — more than a quarter of total head-tax revenues — for the first couple of years, then go up to $30 million a year. The revenues from the tax would be used to provide affordable housing for homeless people.

Amazon was so perturbed by this that it halted construction on a new office tower it was building in downtown Seattle and threatened to pull all of its employees out of another existing building. When Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant held an outdoor press conference, laid-off construction workers disrupted the meeting with shouts of “no head tax.” Despite this, members of the city council insist they will approve the tax. Continue reading

Denver Mayor Demonstrates Insanity

As Albert Einstein didn’t say, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.” Someone points out that this is actually the definition of perserveration. Whatever you call it, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is doing it.

“Shockingly, 73 percent of Denver commuters drive to and from work in cars by themselves,” says Mayor Hancock. So, he plans to serve the people by working to “dedicate more travel lanes as transit only and make bus service more accessible to everyone.”

Hancock is behind the times, as the share of Denver commuters who drive alone to work hasn’t been 73 percent since the early 2000s. According to census data, it was 71 percent in 2000, but grew to 74 percent in 2006 and was 76 percent in 2016. Continue reading

Denver’s Immobility Plan

Denver’s Mayor Michael Hancock has issued what he calls a Mobility Plan. But if carried out, it will actually reduce the mobility of the residents of America’s nineteenth-largest city. Instead of doing anything to relieve congestion, the number one listed goal of the plan is to increase the share of commuters walking, cycling, or taking transit to work to 30 percent. Such a 146-percent increase over the current 12.2 percent is unattainable, so the plan ends up devoting most of the city’s transportation funds to forms of transportation that are either insignificant or obsolete.

Click image to download a 5.5-MB PDF of this plan.

The centerpiece of the Mayor’s plan is dedicated bus lanes on Colfax, Denver’s most important east-west street. Currently, buses carry about 22,000 people a day, more than any other corridor in Denver. But, as the Antiplanner noted recently, dedicated bus lanes can move than many people per hour, and even the 50,000 people per day that the city optimistically projects for Colfax isn’t enough to justify dedicating that much street space to buses. Continue reading

Bike Share Programs: Why?

After less than a year of operation, Baltimore is shutting down its bike share program for a month because so many of its bikes were stolen or are heavily damaged. The program began last November with a 175 bikes–40 percent of which had electric boosters–available for rent from 20 different locations, soon increased to 200 bikes and 20 stations.

One cyclist spent a day recently visiting all 25 stations and found only four bikes available to potential renters. The city says the private partner that is running the operation is upgrading the locks to reduce theft. In the meantime, the city has two full-time employees tracking down the GPS-equipped bikes so that other people can repair them and put them back into service.

Baltimore is far from the first city to have problems with its bike-share program. Seattle’s is attracting only half as many riders as expected. Bike share programs in New York, San Francisco and many other cities have also had problems. Continue reading

Bringing Soviet Planning to New York City

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to bring the same policies that worked so well in the Soviet Union, and more recently in Venezuela, to New York City. “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed,” he says. “And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”

As shown in the urban planning classic, The Ideal Communist City, soviet planners also believed they were smart enough to know how every single plot of land in their cities should be used. The cities built on their planning principles were appallingly ugly and unlivable. They were environmentally sustainable only so long as communism kept people too poor to afford cars and larger homes.

If de Blasio believes in this planning system so much, why doesn’t he implement it in New York City? The biggest obstacle, he says, is “the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He blames housing affordability problems on greedy developers who only build for millionaires. Continue reading

Zoning Wouldn’t Have Saved Houston

The rain hadn’t stopped falling before numerous commentators blamed Houston’s flooding on a lack of zoning. This is simply untrue.

First, flood-plain zoning focuses on “high-risk” areas, which by definition means areas in the 100-year floodplain. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require that homes they mortgage be covered by flood insurance if they are in zone A or V, which means the 100-year floodplain.

But the Houston flooding resulting from tropical storm Harvey was a 1,000-year flood. That means neither zoning nor insurance would have made a difference for the homes outside the 100-year floodplain. At least half of all the homes damaged by Harvey flooding were in the “moderate-risk” zone in the 500-year floodplain but outside the 100-year floodplain, and more were in the low-risk area outside the 500-year floodplain. Continue reading