Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

The victim of PTSD may have experienced or seen an event that induced extreme fear, shock and/or a feeling of helplessness or viagra sans prescription hopelessness. Mental Stress or Depression: Studies have shown that as many as one in every ten people have Learn More Here levitra on line gone through this experience at some point. The concentration of pro cialis get viagra inflammatory granulocytes is dramatically reduced. tadalafil 20mg uk Strength and Vigour: Shilajit Gold capsules when consumed on a daily basis. It is true that housing in the Central Valley is more affordable than in the coastal metropolises, but it still not very affordable. According to the 2017 American Community Survey, median home prices were four times median family incomes in Bakersfield, which makes it the most affordable major urban area in California, but still makes it far less affordable than most urban areas in the rest of the country. Pretty much everywhere else is more affordable outside of the Pacific Coast states, Denver-Boulder, Miami, New York, and Boston. With a value-to-income ratio of 4.3, Fresno — the other big city on the planned high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco — is less affordable than Boston’s 4.2.

Bakersfield and Fresno are more affordable than the coastal regions because they have less restrictive land-use regulations. According to this list, neither Fresno nor Bakersfield nor the counties in which they are located have urban-growth boundaries. But if these counties experienced an influx of newcomers who work in the LA or Bay areas, you can bet that they would soon be agitating for preservation of farm lands. Thus, the high-speed rail line would probably do more to make the Central Valley less affordable than it would to make the coastal areas more affordable.

In any case, the solution to California’s housing affordability problem is to make available for development the private rural lands outside of the coastal urban areas. Neither Los Angeles nor the Bay Area have a shortage of lands; they merely have a shortage of common sense.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

4 Responses to Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

  1. CapitalistRoader says:

    I count seven “Open Space” and/or “Preserve” areas in this ~10 square mile Bay Area chunk of property alone.

  2. Not Sure says:

    he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

    Do the cities in between the expensive to live cities and the more affordable ones ever complain because the high-speed train doesn’t stop there? And if it does stop there, how high-speed can it be if it needs to slow down, stop for loading and then speed up again for every city on the route?

  3. LazyReader says:

    If the train stops at my drive way maybe…….

  4. prk166 says:

    No need to speculate. Brightline – soon to be Virgin Trains USA – is operated a high speed train from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauderale to Miami. If this sort of thing makes sense for people, we should start seeing stories of people selling their homes in Hollywood, Plantation and Miami for places like Lake Worth where comparable housing goes for 28% – 38% less.

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