Category Archives: Mission

Or at least some of it has. Environmentalists are now paying timber companies to stay in business. What?

Apparently, environmental groups have decided that, though they hate clearcutting, they hate urban sprawl even more. So they are willing to subsidize timber companies to keep cutting timber so they don’t want to subdivide their property.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Antiplanner was working as a forestry consultant to the Sierra Club and other major environmental groups, environmentalists hated timber companies because they replaced natural, diverse forests with monocultures.

“Timber companies practice selective logging,” the always-quotable Andy Kerr liked to say: “they select a watershed, and then they log it.” Industry forests were not true monocultures like corn fields, but the were a lot less diverse — in both ages of trees and numbers of species — than natural forests.

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The Antiplanner doesn’t go to movies often, preferring to wait until the DVDs come out. So until last week all I had seen of the Dark Knight were the trailers. I was particularly intrigued to hear the Joker say, “It’s all part of the plan.”

The good and evil antiplanners.

Now that I’ve seen the movie, I understand why people have suggested that the late Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar nomination. His portrayal of the Joker really carried the show. But the trailer took his planning statement out of context.

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Government bureaucrats are true heroes: they all want to help stimulate the economy. They way they want to help, of course, is for Congress to give them billions of dollars.

The noble Forest Service, for example, has a $10 billion wish list for road maintenance and culverts. Not just any culverts, mind you, but “culverts for fish passage.” That makes them extra “green.”

The Forest Service is also preparing a “green jobs” that would create 90,000 jobs, mostly treating fuels on private lands. This is in accord, says the document, with the agency’s “cohesive strategy” for protecting homes in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) from fire.

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What is it about a commons that makes people lose their heads? The commons is, in essence, an institution that is designed to fail. Yet many people believe that we need to somehow maintain a commons so that people will have to collectively deal with its overuse. The Antiplanner interprets this to mean they want a commons so as to teach people to become “New Socialist Men” (and women) — that is, people who work for the collective rather than for themselves.

For example, a folk singer named David Rovics has a song celebrating the commons and criticizing those who would privatize it. (True to his beliefs, Rovics has placed all of his songs, including this one, on line.)

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Environmentalists have raised the alarm about global warming. The U.S. government responds with massive subsidies to a biofuels program. Unfortunately, corn-based ethanol turns out to be even worse than gasoline in its emissions of greenhouse gases. Plus, the conversion of so much corn to ethanol instead of food has led to dramatically rising food prices and food riots all over the world.

Some call the ethanol program “the stupidist federal subsidy” that “makes gasoline costlier and dirtier.” The Antiplanner calls it government planning on a normal day.

Which raises some interesting questions: Have any major government projects ever been successful? If so, what is the ratio of unsuccessful to successful projects? And finally, what were the characteristics that made some of the projects successful while the rest failed?

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Today is income tax day, but it should be known as Government Planning Day as it is partly thanks to government planners that we have to pay so much taxes. Since I have mostly been self employed, I rarely get tax refunds. So I usually wait until the last day to file so I can hold onto my money as long as possible.

When I talk with my left-leaning friends, most of whom are politically active, I notice that most of the political battles they are involved in are against some government agency or another. While they may rhetorically rail against corporations, the entities they actually fight are such things as the Bureau of Land Management, state agencies, or city governments. They know that government isn’t working for them, but they have a childish faith that, if only the right people were in charge, government would do everything they expect of it.

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As if I don’t have enough to do, I’ve started an Antiplanning Database. Since a blog is really just a database, I thought that we could have a blog that had nothing but research papers, data, and other useful information.

As long as we can agree on a standard format, I would be glad to allow anyone, planner or antiplanner, who asked to post to this database. This would give everyone access to all the latest on-line research and reports on planning and antiplanning issues. As long as there are no copyright problems, I also want to upload all documents to the Thoreau Institute’s or American Dream Coalition’s web sites so we won’t have to worry about addresses changing and/or documents disappearing.
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So far I have only added a half-dozen documents to the database. But take a look at it, give me your comments on the format, and let me know if you would like to be added to the list of people who can post to the site.

The Antiplanner is in the Raisin Capital of the World today, also known as Fresno, California. I am attending (and speaking at) the San Joaquin Valley Housing Conference about California’s perennial (since growth-management planning began in the 1970s) housing crisis.

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The conference is taking place at the Fresno Convention Center, so if you are in Fresno, drop by to say hello. I personally won’t be on the agenda until 2:15, when I will give a workshop mistitled “Planning for Affordable Homeownership.” I suspect that’s a little joke that the Fresno Housing & Community Development Division is playing on me, as they were just a bit reluctant to invite me to appear.

Another Christmas has come and gone. Watching my niece and nephew open their presents reminded me of when I was dazzled by the Christmas tree lights and dreaming about the possibilities of all the things under the tree. To this day, the best present I’ve ever received was a model train that I had received the year before but that my father had expertly repainted in the colors of my favorite railroad, the Great Northern.

I remembered asking all sorts of questions at that age: What is the fastest train in the world? How does Santa Claus fit in the chimney? And why do things cost money? Why doesn’t the government just give people what they need?

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Last week, in a comment on a comment on a post, I mentioned that alleys lead to increased crime. So naturally, someone who is Google-challenged asked me to prove it. It turns out there is a lot of evidence that alleys contribute to crime by providing quiet places where criminals can hide their activities and by offering easy access to secondary entrances to people’s homes.

The research goes back at least as far as the late Oscar Newman, an architect who wanted to know why some neighborhoods suffered higher crime rates than other neighborhoods inhabited by people in a similar socioeconomic class. Newman found that urban design plays a role in making neighborhoods more or less vulnerable to crime, and that the two most important factors were having defensible space, which usually means private property, and impermeability, which means limiting the number of access points to dwellings and businesses. By limiting permeability, cul de sacs make neighborhoods less vulnerable to crime; by increasing permeability, alleys make neighborhoods more vulnerable.

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