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Category Archives: Housing

We Were Warned Not to Bunch Up

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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We were warned. After September 11, 2001, historian Stephen Ambrose told us what to do.

“One of the first things you learn in the Army is that, when you and your fellow soldiers are within range of enemy artillery, rifle fire, or bombs, don’t bunch up,” wrote Ambrose in the Wall Street Journal. Now that the U.S. was under attack from terrorists, Ambrose urged the nation as a whole to learn the same lesson: “don’t bunch up.” “In this age of electronic revolution,” he noted, “it is no longer necessary to pack so many people and office into such small space as lower Manhattan.”

Ambrose’s advice was ignored. Manhattan’s population has grown by at least 100,000 people since 2001. Fitting 1.6 million people on a 23-square-mile island is only possible because of transit systems that force people to pack themselves into buses and railcars. Continue reading →

The Market Urbanist vs. the Antiplanner

By | | Housing
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I like Scott Beyer, who calls himself “the Market Urbanist.” He and the Antiplanner see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. But we also have some areas of fundamental disagreement, as shown in the Reason video below.

Some of them are simply factual. He thinks there is a large, pent-up demand for dense housing in the cities. To the extent that such demand exists, I think it is an artifact of restrictions that prevent low-density development at the periphery of many urban areas. Continue reading →

Moving into Your Socialist Home

By | | Housing
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“Housing is a human right,” asserts Oregon’s U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer in a paper titled Locked Out: Reversing Federal Housing Failures and Unlocking Opportunity.” That’s debatable, but if Blumenauer really believes it, then why does he support Oregon’s land-use laws that heavily restrict suburban development? After all, that’s the only kind of housing development that is truly affordable.

Click image to download this 28-page report.

Blumenauer was a first-term state representative in 1973, when the legislature passed the state’s land-use law, and he’s been around enough since then to know how urban-growth boundaries have driven up land prices in the cities. Yet his paper completely ignores the role of this law in creating the housing crisis. Continue reading →

Yahoo Headline Writers Should Learn to Read

By | | Housing
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A new study finds that some “metro areas have used an urban sprawl to continue to provide ample housing stock for residents” whereas areas that have emphasized dense developments have seen rents reach an all-time high.

Yahoo! News headlined its report on this study, “How affordable housing in big cities is hurt by urban sprawl.” Yet neither the article nor the study explains how urban sprawl in affordable metro areas makes housing in dense metro areas less affordable.

“It seems that the metros most effectively meeting the demand for new housing are still primarily doing so by continuing to sprawl,” says the study, “despite an increasing demand for dense, walkable neighborhoods that prioritize sustainability.” This was supposed to have been written by an economist, but wouldn’t an economist question whether demand for dense neighborhoods is really increasing if builders, whose livelihoods depend on keep up with demand, aren’t building them in less-regulated areas? Continue reading →

An Affordable Housing Boondoggle

By | | Housing
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Thanks to its urban-growth boundary, Denver has a housing affordability problem. Apartment rents have increased by 65 percent in the last decade, while the nationwide cost of living in that time rose by just 18 percent and rents nationwide increased by an average of 28 percent.

One of the city’s responses was to create a housing voucher program for people who earn too much to qualify for federal housing vouchers but still can’t afford rents in the city. Last July, it allocated $1 million to the program which was supposed to help 125 families.

So far just three households have been able to use it. Out of the million dollars, $180,000 went for administrative overhead, which is a lot of money for just three renters. Continue reading →

Rolling Homeless Shelters

By | | Housing, Transportation
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Transit advocates have a new reason to justify subsidies to public transit: transit vehicles provide shelters for homeless people. San Jose’s perennially cash-strapped Valley Transportation Authority is proposing to cut its only all-night bus route, but homeless advocates are protesting the plan because the buses are “another lifeline” to homeless people. The night-time buses cost taxpayers half a million dollars a year, money that could probably be more effectively spent on behalf of either homeless people or transit riders.

In Minneapolis, the Green Line light rail, which runs all night, has become the shelter of choice for 200 to 300 people seeking to escape the winter’s cold. Heartless people who have their own homes complain that the homeless people make light-rail cars overcrowded, filthy, and smelling of urine, so much so that Metro Transit has had to add four staff members to clean the cars every morning. Some suggest that Metro Transit should stop running the trains from 2 am to 4 am to keep homeless people from using them overnight, but homeless advocates object that such people “need our help.”

The link was strong even levitra cialis viagra after considering other factors associated with impotence – such as smoking, drinking alcohol, diabetes, high blood pressure and bad effects of certain drugs. The most encouraging part from the group was that they improved their blood glucose purchase generic viagra level is gained. CBT is performed by viagra without prescription free a licensed therapist – a reputable practitioner that your main physician can recommend – and focuses on changing the pondering and behavior from the nervousness sufferer. Feeling commonly begins to return within a viagra prescription canada few weeks and the numbness might be entirely gone after several months. While there are several different causes of homelessness, the problem is clearly worsened by growth-management planning that makes housing expensive. One study estimates that a 10 percent increase in housing prices results in a 14 percent rise in the rate of homelessness. A study released last month in Oregon concluded that “high rents are to blame for the severity of the state’s homelessness crisis.” Continue reading →

Regulating Affordability

By | | Housing
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Two recent op-eds illustrate the dilemmas lawmakers face when dealing with unaffordable housing. The first explains to readers on Capitol Hill how Oregon is pretending to make housing more affordable when in fact almost everything it does makes it less affordable.

The article points out that in 1971 Oregon’s then-governor Tom McCall told a national group, “We want you to visit our state, but for heaven’s sake, don’t move here!” To make sure they didn’t, the Oregon legislature passed and McCall signed a 1973 land-use law that ended up limiting all urban growth to less than 1.2 percent of the land in the state. Naturally, developable land has become expensive and housing has become unaffordable, which helps keep people from moving to the state.

The article suggests, however, the state officials must be disappointed that Washington has made itself even less affordable despite not passing a similar law until 1990. As a result, many of the efforts made to provide “affordable housing” must be viewed as ways “to prevent a flood of Washingtonians from moving into more affordable Oregon.” Rent control, which every economist agrees makes housing less affordable, is only one of the ways the state is doing that. Continue reading →

Killing the California Dream

By | | Housing
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Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City,” writes LA Times columnist George Skelton (reprinted in the Mercury-News and East Bay Times in case you run into the LA Times paywall). After reading his article, the Antiplanner has just one question: Why?

Skelton argues that California’s population has grown in the last 70 years and is still growing. But he doesn’t seem to realize that the vast majority of the state is still rural. The 2010 census found that urban areas covering just 5.3 percent of the state is urban and houses 95 percent of the state’s population.

In 2000, California conducted a housing supply study titled Raising the Roof. The full text of the study is no longer available on the California housing department’s web site, so I’ve posted it here. Chapter 3 assesses how much land in each county is available for development, data summarized in exhibit 13 (previously cited here). Continue reading →

Affordable Housing at $530 Per Square Foot

By | | Housing
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Last year, Portland’s Metro persuaded voters to raise their property taxes (which will make housing less affordable) so Metro could sell $652.8 million worth of bonds that could be applied to so-called affordable housing projects. The first such project will be the Mary Ann, a four-story apartment in Beaverton.

The apartments will actually be built by Reach Community Development, a non-profit housing group that is using low-income tax credits to pay nearly 55 percent of the $20.9 million cost. Metro will provide another $3 million, so Reach only has to recover $6.5 million from rents or sales in the building. Continue reading →

Infill Won’t Make Housing Affordable

By | | Housing
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The Portland Planning Commission has approved a plan to rezone almost all of the city’s single-family neighborhoods to quadruple the current densities. Planners claimed that this would make housing more affordable by allowing the construction of tens of thousands of new triplexes or fourplexes in the next few years.

Internal documents, however reveal that the planners’ own projections are that this change will lead to fewer than 4,000 new housing units. Moreover, most of those units will be in poor neighborhoods, resulting in the displacement of low-income families by people who can afford to live in new, higher-cost housing.

Fourplexes won’t solve housing affordability problems because Portland’s urban-growth boundary makes land prices high. Quadrupling densities won’t help if the land itself costs four times as much as in urban areas that don’t have growth boundaries. Continue reading →