Welfare to Wealthy Golfers

Bandon, Oregon, my home town, was featured in the New York Times last week as a “hard-luck community” apparently inhabited by a bunch of rubes who foolishly subsidize wealthy executives. The article (also viewable as a video) actually left out some of the juiciest parts of this tale.

#6 at Bandon Dunes Golf Course. Photo by Bandon Dunes Resort.

The story is about Bandon Dunes, a destination golf resort built by a wealthy golf enthusiast named Mike Keiser (who, everybody likes to observe, made his money selling greeting cards printed on recycled paper). Keiser spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money building the course on sheer speculation. When he opened, greens fees started at something like $175 a round (and are now as high as $250). But every hole has an ocean view and the course was quickly rated one of the best in America, so he got more business than originally anticipated.

Keiser did not need any subsidies to build. Full disclosure: I understand Keiser gives money to my new employer, the Cato Institute. After his resort proved successful, however, some local governments decided to promote their empires by subsidizing Bandon Dunes and its wealthy customers.

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How Do We Get to Work?

The Census Bureau just released 2005 data indicating that the city of Portland “ranks first in the nation for biking to work.” The bureau director actually came to Portland to make the announcement. “It’s like a Swiss city, clean, with trains and bikes everywhere,” he gushed.

Cyclists crossing the Willamette River. When I did this in the 1970s, it seemed like I was one of a mere handful of Portlanders who biked to work year round.
Flickr photo by Bike Portland.

Actually, the numbers show that only 3.5 percent of Portland workers bike to work, which hardly suggests they are “everywhere.” In fact, only in downtown and the inner city do you see a lot of cyclists. Downtown has about a third of the jobs in the city of Portland, but the Portland Business Alliance’s census of downtown employers indicates that well over half of all bike commuters work downtown.

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Planning and Growth

Fifty-seven years ago, the city of San Jose hired a new city manager, A. P. “Dutch” Hamann, who previously had been a middle manager for General Motors. Hamann had a vision for San Jose and he carried it out with gusto.

Sprawling San Jose.

Hamann had grown up in Orange County and felt there was something wrong with an urban area that did not have an identifiable central city. He could see that the area that would eventually be known as Silicon Valley was growing, and he set out to make San Jose, which calls itself the oldest city in California, the most important city in the region.

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Light Rail Stations Magnet for Crime

Add two more costs to the exhorbitant price of light-rail transit: crime, and the cost of preventing such crime. Portland’s TriMet transit agency is spending $560,000 dollars adding security cameras to five light-rail stations — that’s $112,000 per station.

“Crime activity,” says the Gresham police chief, “has increased in the areas along the platforms.” This is hardly news. A decade ago, the Milwaukie police chief told me that police throughout the Portland area knew that the opening of a light-rail station would be followed by an increase in property crime in the vicinity.

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Transit Industry Skillfully Manipulates Media

About 100 mixed-use, transit-oriented developments are being built in this country, says the June 11 Wall Street Journal (link will expire in six days). The writer of the article falls for the transit propaganda about “revitalizing cities” and “smaller households” wanting to live in higher densities.

Most mixed-use developments “are public-private partnerships,” admits the article. “Local governments build or refurbish rail lines and surrounding infrastructure like roads and parking facilities. Private developers then build in the surrounding areas.”

Transit-oriented developments like this one in Portland typically receive tens of millions of dollars in subsidies. See also Save Portland and Debunking Portland.
Flickr photo by agencyaspen.

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Minneapolis Light Rail Loses Another Passenger

A woman who stumbled as she tried to board a light-rail train in Minneapolis fell under the train and was killed. Horrifically, the driver of the train did not realize what had happened, so proceeded to take the blood-splattered train four more stops to the end of the line.

Passengers on board the train said they heard knocking on the doors, then “bup bup bup bup,” and then saw blood spattering the windows. But none bothered to inform the driver even though the trains are equipped with a passenger-to-driver intercom.

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Personal Rapid Transit in Morgantown, WV

Back in the 1970s, some people thought that personal rapid transit (PRT) would replace the automobile. By sometime early in the twenty-first century, we would all be traveling in small, computerized vehicles riding soundlessly on fixed tracks. The vehicles would go nearly 100 miles per hour, and each car would go exactly to where its occupants wanted to go over the least congested route.

I’ve been intrigued by this concept since 1972, when I heard a presentation about it by a consulting firm named Deleuw-Cather to the Portland city council. DeLeuw-Cather was trying to get some city to buy into the idea, and it claimed that the Germans and Japanese were experimenting with this system and had solved most of the technical problems.

Wikipedia photo by Darren Ringer.

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Charlotte to Revote on Light Rail

Angry taxpayers raised enough money to collect tens of thousands of signatures to put a transit tax back on the ballot in Charlotte, NC. Charlotte-area voters had approved a half-cent tax to support light-rail construction in 1998.

But cost overruns made the project controversial, and opponents want to stop the transit agency from beginning construction on more lines. The voters will get a chance to repeal the tax in November, just a few weeks before the first line opens for business.

Will Charlotte drivers switch to light rail or do they just want other people to switch so they can drive on uncongested roads?
Flickr photo by jacreative.

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What Is Livability?

What makes a city or region a great place to live? Certainly climate and proximity to stunning scenic vistas are important, but they are beyond our control. Of the things that are within our control, what most contributes to livability? If there is more than one factor, how would you rank them?

I hope the many experts who read this will all present their answers. It would be helpful, though not essential, if your answers were:

  1. Quantifiable
  2. Available through some published database
  3. Outputs rather than inputs

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But these are guidelines. I invite all possible answers.

Rezoning for Me But Not for Thee

A prominent environmentalist in Lane County, Oregon, has persuaded the county commission to rezone forest land at the urban fringe to allow him to put a house on it. His argument is that, since there are houses on the land next to his land, he should be allowed to put a house on his land too.

By that reasoning, urban-growth boundaries should be expanded whenever a landowner adjacent to but outside the boundary is ready to build a home. Sounds like a good policy to me.

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