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Affordable Sprawl vs. Costly Walkability

By | | Regional planning
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A Pew poll released Wednesday found that 57 percent of Americans say they would rather live in a neighborhood with larger houses spaced further apart, even if it means driving to stores or restaurants, as opposed to one with smaller homes closer together but with shops and cafes within walking distance. That’s up from 53 percent in 2019 but down from 60 percent in 2021.

Do you prefer this . . .

The survey also found that young people and Democrats were more likely to want walkable communities while older people and Republicans were more likely to want more drivable communities. As with the general results, all groups tended to move towards a preference to low-density areas after the pandemic, and have partly moved back since then. Continue reading →

Americans Continue to Move out of Big Cities

By | | News commentary
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“Nobody wants to be in a large, crowded city during a pandemic, but what about afterward? Don’t they miss bright lights? Theater? All-night diners?” asks MoveBuddha, a relocation service. “So far, the answer has been, ‘no.'” The company’s data show that net migration continues to be away from major cities and to small towns and exurban areas.

Click image to review this report.

The only cities over 250,000 that saw positive net in-migration actually prove the rule that people are leaving large, dense cities. Honolulu saw 2.19 in-migrants for every out-migrant, but the city of Honolulu covers the entire island of Oahu, of which only 37 percent is urbanized, so many of those in-migrants may have gone to rural parts of the city. The second-most was Anchorage at 2.17 in-migrants for every out-migrant, but, like Honolulu, Anchorage covers a huge area that is rural. In fact, less than 4 percent of the borough of Anchorage is considered urban. The only other two large cities that are gaining more in-migrants than out-migrants are Tulsa and Charlotte. At fewer than 2,000 people per square mile Tulsa is one the lowest-density big cities in the country (and also one of the most affordable), while Charlotte isn’t far behind at about 2,500 per square mile. Continue reading →

How Do You Define “Feasible”?

By | | City planning
3 Comments

A recent study concludes that it is feasible to convert some downtown buildings into residences. However, given the qualifications they put on this statement, I strongly suspect the authors’ definition of “feasible” is quite a bit different from mine.

Can the owner of this office building feasibly convert this space to residences? The answer, according to some, is “yes” so long as taxpayers give the property owner enough subsidies. Photo by Tomi Knuutila.

First, at least some of the building conversions they studied were hotels, not office buildings. Hotels, which are already residential in a sense, have a lot more plumbing that make them easier to convert to residential uses than offices. Continue reading →

Portland Makes the New York Times

By | | Housing, News commentary
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A few years ago the New York Times was praising Portland as the “city that loves mass transit” (meaning it loved to spend money on mass transit, not actually ride it) and the city where people were willing to live lightly in 400-square-foot apartments. How the mighty have fallen: Last Saturday, Portland rated most of the top half of the Times front page with an article about homelessness, drug addiction, and death.

Click image for a larger view.

The article and accompanying photos jump to fill two entire interior pages of the newspaper. At around 3,500 words, the article qualifies as a long read, especially for a newspaper. But for many people, including Jack Bogdanski, the article was more notable for what it didn’t say than what it did. Continue reading →

Hawaiian Governor Suspends Land-Use Law

By | | Housing
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Hawaii’s housing prices aren’t quite as high as California’s, but they are close. This isn’t because Hawaii is running out of land; the vast majority of land on each of the main islands is rural. Instead, it is due to a 1961 land-use law and subsequent amendments that placed most of the land in the state off limits to development. One result is that the state’s population is declining as people are leaving for more affordable places.

Governor Josh Green has responded by issuing a proclamation suspending the land-use law and several other laws, including a historic preservation law, for one year in order to allow homebuilders to construct 50,000 new homes in the next five years. Naturally, environmental groups are upset, and it isn’t clear to me that a governor can suspend a law passed by the legislature, but at least it will make people aware of what the real problems are and how to fix them. Continue reading →

Amtrak Carried 86% of Pre-Pandemic PM in May

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Amtrak carried 492 million passenger-miles in May 2023, which was just 86.4 percent of the 569 million passenger-miles it carried in the same month of 2019, according to Amtrak’s latest monthly performance report. Considering that Amtrak’s April passenger-miles were nearly 91 percent as many in 2023 as 2019, this is a disappointing result. Since Amtrak ridership usually usually picks up in May due to increased vacationers, this suggests that Americans aren’t enthusiastic about riding trains for discretionary travel in a post-COVID world.

For detailed comments on transit and highways, see my July 12 post.

All three types of Amtrak trains underperformed in May, with Northeast Corridor trains carrying less than 88 percent of pre-pandemic riders, long-distance trains carrying 85 percent, and state-supported day trains carrying less than 81 percent. It is worth noting that Amtrak is putting most of the money it received for expansion in the infrastructure bill into state-supported trains even though they are the worst-performing part of its network. Amtrak’s reasoning is that Congress gave it money for capital improvements but not operating costs, so it will need to persuade the states to pay for operating costs of any new routes or increased frequencies. Continue reading →

Fixing the Failed the Music City Star

By | | Transportation
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The Regional Transportation Authority of Nashville is asking members of the public how the agency can make its commuter train more convenient to riders. The train, once called the Music City Star but since renamed the much less evocative WeGo Star, was supposed to carry 700 round trips a day in its first year but the closest it came was in 2018 when it carried 581 round trips a day.

In 2021, this fell to a mere 69 round trips a day. The transit agency, which also calls itself WeGo, spent $4 million operating the line but earned less than $142,000 in revenues, which works out to an operating subsidy of more than $108 per rider. The agency claims ridership is currently up to 200 round-trips a day, but even if that’s true it still represents subsidies of around $35 per rider. Continue reading →

Is Telecommuting More Productive?

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Economist gravely announced that people working at home were less productive than people who commuted to a workplace. I didn’t find its evidence persuasive, however, as the studies it cited mostly dealt with low-skilled jobs such as call centers and data entry.

Click image to download a 17.4-MB PDF of this report from the McKinsey Institute.

Yesterday, the Hill reported just the opposite: telecommuting, a new study has shown, increases worker output. This is partly because remote workers save a lot of time by not having to commute, and they tend to spend almost half of that time working. The article also pointed out that overall worker productivity is higher now than before the pandemic, and telecommuting is one of the factors increasing that productivity. Continue reading →

Get Those Cows off My Lawn!

By | | Public lands
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The Antiplanner is hardly a radical environmentalist, but I’ve lost patience with one environmentally destructive activity: livestock grazing on public lands. Taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars a year to subsidize this grazing, while the ranchers who have permits to do it have successfully lobbied Congress to keep they fees they pay almost zero while their cattle and sheep trample fish habitat and compete with wildlife for forage.

Cattle on BLM land in eastern Oregon. BLM photo by Gary Shine.

Livestock grazing was once a profit center for the Forest Service; in 1920, the agency actually made a profit and most of its income came from ranchers, not timber buyers. But in 1978, ranchers persuaded Congress to impose a fee formula on the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that supposedly calculated fair market value by starting with the value of livestock and subtracting all of the costs of production. What was left over was supposed to be the fee. Continue reading →

Houston BRT Failure

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
2 Comments

A Houston bus rapid transit route over dedicated bus lanes is attracting less than 10 percent of the riders that were projected for it. The Silver Line opened in August 2020 with the expectation that it would carry 14,850 weekday riders, but in fact it is carrying less than 900 riders per weekday, about 6 percent of projections.

A Houston Silver Line sits empty, which is not unusual for it even when in motion. Photo by Ricky Courtney.

Metro, Houston’s transit agency, originally wanted to put a light-rail line in the Silver Line corridor, but opposition from local residents led it to “downgrade” the line to bus rapid transit. According to Houston businessman Bill King, Metro still managed to spend $200 million on the 4.7-mile route, mostly through tax-increment financing. This was a lot less than the $500 million or so that light rail would have cost but still a lot more than necessary. Continue reading →