Denver’s transit agency, RTD, has generated lots of controversy by planning to take people’s land by eminent domain. But in a recent case, RTD may have bitten off more than it can chew.
RTD proposes to take some land near downtown Denver to use as a maintenance facility. The owner is not some small business but a major development company that took out full-page, color ads in major Denver papers to protest the taking.
Smart-growth planners say we need to save energy by reducing our driving. James Howard Kunstler goes so far as to say, “No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it.”
Fortunately, some brighter people have different ideas. T. Boone Pickens has proposed the Pickens Plan, which calls for substituting wind and other renewables for all electrical generation, thus freeing up natural gas (which is the source of about 22 percent of our electricity) for transportation.
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, has a slightly different plan. He would replace many of the petroleum-fueled vehicles on the road today with electric cars and light trucks.
Some commenters on yesterday’s post want to pretend that the Antiplanner “cherry picked” three data series to show regions with a housing bubble and three more to show regions without a bubble. What rubbish.
My 2006 report on housing is based on data for 385 housing markets. Complete data are in the spreadsheet that I prepared for the report. You can use this spreadsheet to make your own charts like the ones in yesterday’s post for up to 6 metro areas at a time.
“Planning-induced housing bubbles not only threaten individual families and local economies,” the Antiplanner wrote in Best-Laid Plans, “they threaten the world economy.” Those threats are being realized today.
The federal government seized another big bank last week. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are on the verge of collapse and the fed is likely to announce a major bailout this week. More banks are expected to fail soon. “This is a very serious banking crisis,” says a former president of the American Bankers Association.
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A recent article in The Atlantic indirectly sheds some light on Portland’s light-rail crime wave. The article notes several research studies have shown that demolition of major housing projects, such as Chicago’s Cabrini Green, was soon followed by suburban crime waves. Residents of the housing projects used section 8 vouchers to move to lower-middle-class suburbs and, in some cases, brought the crime with them.
Moving poor people from public housing to private rental housing was supposed to help them get out of poverty, meaning children would be more likely to graduate from high school and adults more likely to get a job. But a reanalysis of the research on which this claim was based found that the sample size was small and that people who moved actually worked less in their new homes than when they lived in the projects.
Portland did not have high-rise public housing projects, but it did have a concentration of low-income people who were pushed out of their neighborhoods by urban-growth-boundary-induced gentrification. Portland planner John Fregonese puts a positive spin on this, saying that “segregation is breaking down in Portland.” While it is soothing to think that Portland is getting more integrated, it does not necessarily mean the lives of the people forced out by gentrification have improved.
Reason magazine features a debate between three nominally libertarian thinkers over the appropriate response to global warming: cap and trade, carbon tax, or deregulate the economy. Ron Bailey, one of the debaters, has gone from ardent global warming skeptic, to something is happening but we probably aren’t causing it, to okay warming is real but we can’t do anything about it. Now he supports a carbon tax.
Lynne Kiesling, an economist from Northwestern University, supports cap and trade, but never really says why she favors it over a carbon tax.
Fred Smith, the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that either of these approaches are likely to cost more than global warming itself — if global warming is happening, which Smith is almost willing to admit, though he thinks it will hardly be catastrophic. Instead, he argues that the world needs to deregulate — deregulate trade, deregulate electricity, deregulate biotechnology. This way, we can build wealth and technology and be ready for any warming (or cooling) that happens.
The Antiplanner is not a conservative, so I can hardly be an Obamacon (a conservative who supports Obama). I am not even certain I support Obama. But this article in the San Francisco Chronicle certainly captures how I feel about the current election.
Obama seems pretty fiscally liberal. But, as Cato Institute executive David Boaz says some libertarians are thinking, “Do you think Obama will increase spending by $1 trillion, because that’s what Republicans did over the past two presidential terms. So really, how much worse can he be?”
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin famously promised that New Orleans would remain a “chocolate city.” (He later apologized to anyone who took offense at the remark.)
I interpreted his promise to mean that he would make sure that low-income people who had been driven from their homes by the flood would be able to return. He hasn’t kept that promise. According to the latest report, low-income people who have been receiving section 8 rental assistance say they aren’t allowed to return to New Orleans because New Orleans is considered a “higher rent” city and they won’t be allowed to get rental assistance there.
Were it not for the planners, this neighborhood might have been rebuilt already.
Flickr photo by Ed Yourdon.
Almost every forester I’ve ever met, even ones who work for environmental groups, believes that forests “need” to be thinned. Not just some forests; virtually all forests. Take a forester and show him or her a natural forest, or even one that has been thinned but not in the last ten or so years, and they will invariably say, “This forest needs thinning.”
Is this forest “diseased and in poor health”?
At one time, these foresters argued that thinnings boosted the economic value of the trees. The trees that would be left behind would grow faster. Because you can cut more lumber out of a bigger tree, a few bigger trees are more valuable than many small trees.
