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Category Archives: Regional planning

Town and Country Dystopian Act

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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The United Kingdom has some of the least affordable housing of any country in the world, with median homes costing more than five times median incomes. In the United States, only California and Hawaii have less affordable housing. A new report estimates that the U.K. needs 4.3 million homes to restore affordability, but the country’s planning system prevents those homes from being built.

Click image to download a 5.1-MB PDF of this 65-page report.

The report, which is published by a think tank called Centre for Cities, correctly places the blame for the state of the country’s housing on the Town & Country Planning Act of 1947. This law took away development rights from every private landowner in the country and only allowed new development if it complied with local and regional land-use plans. Continue reading →

The Sovietization of Oregon

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A sweeping new housing bill is prancing its way through the Oregon legislature in the name of affordable housing. The bill would greatly reduce the rights of Oregon residents to have a say in the future of their neighborhoods. Instead, it would direct the state’s Office of Economic Analysis to set housing targets for all cities in the state with more than 10,000 residents, and those cities would have six to eight years to meet those targets no matter what the cost.

If House Bill 2889 passes, there may a place for you to live in Oregon as long as you don’t mind living in a tiny apartment in a place like this. Despite promises of affordability, it won’t be cheap unless it is subsidized: 537-square-foot apartments in this building rent for $1,425 a month. Photo from GBD.

When Oregon first passed its land-use regulations back in the 1970s, citizen involvement was the number one goal. Now, anyone who doesn’t think a giant apartment building should be built next their house is a NIMBY and probably a racist and should be ignored. Continue reading →

Land-Use Planning in a Fire Plain

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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Fed by high winds, a wildfire about 50 miles from Antiplanner headquarters in Camp Sherman blew up on Sunday, burning 34,000 acres in a few hours. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Land Conservation & Development Commission (LCDC) is seeking comments on a report it has prepared on “wildfire adapted communities.”

Click image to download a copy of this report (2.9-MB).

The report says little about density other than to suggest that structures be clustered “in areas of lowest risk.” Since the only places in Oregon that are naturally at low risk of wildfire are underwater, this suggests that no “clustering” of development makes sense. Continue reading →

Most Americans Don’t Believe Planners

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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A recent survey found that 93 percent of planning students oppose highway expansion because they believe that it won’t relieve congestion due to induced demand. However, the survey found, only 24 percent of the general public agrees. Similarly, 83 percent of planning students believe the government should try to reduce the amount of driving Americans do, but only 31 percent of the general public agrees.

When was the last time an urban planner lied to you? Photo from Seattle Municipal Archives.

It never occurs to planners that results like these might indicate that they are wrong. After all, they are the experts and the general public is not, so the public should let them do what they want. Continue reading →

Most Big Cities Lost Population in 2021

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
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I announced yesterday I was retiring from daily blog posts, but I also said I would comment on new data when it was relevant. So I can hardly pass up noting that the Census Bureau just posted 2021 population data for the more than 800 American cities larger than 50,000 people. As I predicted in a recent policy brief, the new numbers show that most dense cities lost population while low-density cities grew.

Less than 2 percent of the jobs in the Phoenix area are in downtown Phoenix, making it one of the least downtown-dependent major cities in the country. Low-density housing throughout the region makes it attractive to people wanting to avoid crowded areas. Photo by Adam Fagen.

Of America’s largest cities, expensive ones such as Los Angeles and San Francisco lost residents (with the latter declining by 6.3 percent!), but affordable cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta also declined. The largest cities whose populations grew were Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, and Jacksonville. With the exception of Austin, these are all low-density cities whose downtowns are tiny by traditional standards, each with well under 50,000 jobs before the pandemic. In other words, housing affordability was an issue, but more important was people were leaving dense areas for low-density areas. Continue reading →

Property Rights and the New Feudalism

By | | Regional planning
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The war in Ukraine has forced people of the “West”—a term that has come to mean most of Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand—to confront a social system that we have pretended went extinct hundreds of years ago: feudalism. While feudalism has mostly disappeared from the above-named nations, it is thriving in Putin’s Russia, as well as many other places around the world.

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

“Broadly defined,” says Wikipedia, feudalism “was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor.” A classic example is when William, the Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066. Prior to the conquest, people in England could buy and sell land, a system left over from when the Roman Empire ruled Britain.

Continue reading →

Americans Fleeing Dense Cities & Suburbs

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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Americans are leaving the cities. Between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York City lost 305,000 residents. Los Angeles County lost nearly 160,000. Cook County, home of Chicago, lost nearly 90,000. San Francisco lost nearly 55,000. The counties in which Boston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington are located each lost well over 20,000. Collectively, the counties containing 26 of the nation’s 33 largest cities lost nearly 900,000 residents.

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

Changes in population in 2021 are particularly revealing because the nation’s overall population hardly grew that year. The Census Bureau estimates that 2021 numbers were only 0.1 percent greater than in 2020, the slowest growth rate since the nation began. Thus, local population changes mainly reflect people’s preferences about where they want to live, not birth rates or foreign immigration. Continue reading →

Big City Populations Fell in 2021

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
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The populations of many big cities declined in 2021 according to data recently released by the Census Bureau. The new data are for counties and metropolitan areas (which are simply the sums of various counties), and not necessarily for cities. But many cities, including Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle, are closely identified with single counties, so those counties can be compared with surrounding counties to see what is going on.

People are leaving the cities.

I may cover this in more detail in a future policy brief, but for now I want to ask a single question: did people move out of cities in 2020 because of taxes and housing prices, as one article claims, or because of COVID? Continue reading →

LCDC’s Phony Climate Rules

By | | Regional planning
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Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) is writing new climate rules aimed at helping Oregon reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The rules won’t do that, but they will impose even higher housing and transportation costs on Oregonians.

This is LCDC’s example of what it calls a “climate-friendly” neighborhood. Pay no attention to all of the cars in the picture. LCDC photo.

LCDC is a seven-member unelected commission that rigidly controls all of Oregon’s private land. Most importantly, it requires cities to have urban-growth boundaries and forbids development of most areas outside of those boundaries. The proposed new rules will impose even stricter policies on landowners in urban areas. Continue reading →

Portland Downtown Devastated by COVID

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
33 Comments

The number of people working in downtown Portland dropped from more than 103,000 in mid-2019 to 13,000 in mid-2020, according to a State of the Economy report recently published by the Portland Business Alliance. The report doesn’t actually show numbers, but the chart below, which I took from the report, can be used to make pretty close estimates.

This chart is taken from page 3 of Portland Business Alliance’s State of the Economy report. Click image for a larger view.

By the end of 2021, the downtown area had recovered to about 34,000 workers, still less than a third of pre-pandemic numbers. The pandemic may not be the only factor depressing downtown employment: Black Lives Matter protests that began in May 2020 resulted in “numerous instances of arson, looting, vandalism, and injuries,” many of which affected downtown businesses and will probably continue to do so well into the future. Continue reading →