The Antiplanner » Follow up

Category Archives: Follow up

Density and Fertility

By | | Follow up
12 Comments

Nearly three months ago, I suggested that trying to get people to live in high-density housing projects was a good way to “kill a country” by reducing fertility rates. Not everyone was persuaded; one comment stated that there is “Not a shred of evidence other than his bald assertion that people in Korea have no room for kids.”

A Twitter user calling itself “More Births” has reached the same conclusion as the Antiplanner. After noting that South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand all have very low fertility rates, More Births asked what these regions have in common. The number 1 factor listed: ultra-dense housing policies. Continue reading →

What’s Happening in Oregon and Vermont?

By | | Follow up
15 Comments

A few weeks ago, I noted that there appeared to be correlation between government efforts to get more people into multifamily housing and low fertility rates. The correlation is not perfect — I estimated about 0.4 — because there are a lot of factors that affect fertility rates, but it appears strong enough that, if the goal is to have a healthy demographic structure, then single-family housing should be preferred.

Click image for a larger view. Source: BirthGauge.

Unfortunately, the census data I had available didn’t allow me to make a standard calculation of birth rates, so I used a substitute. Now, a group called BirthGauge has published the above map showing birth rates calculated the standard way. It does show that birth rates are lowest in the Pacific Coast and north Atlantic Coast states that have done the most to restrict new single-family housing in favor of multifamily. Continue reading →

More on High Rises and Fertility Rates

By | | Follow up, Housing
4 Comments

The Antiplanner was first alerted to a tweet about South Korea’s low birth rate from Marginal Revolution, a blog from George Mason economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Being from George Mason, they lean libertarian, but haven’t learned enough about housing economics to realize that YIMBYism isn’t about housing affordability or property rights but about forcing more Americans to live in multi-family housing.

The ideal American city under YIMBYism. Photo of Seoul by Gerhard Huber.

So I appreciated it when Cowen mentioned my post on birth rates and high-rise housing in Marginal Revolution. They get a lot more readers than this blog, so it led to lots of comments. Continue reading →

Most Big Cities Lost Population in 2021

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
4 Comments

I announced yesterday I was retiring from daily blog posts, but I also said I would comment on new data when it was relevant. So I can hardly pass up noting that the Census Bureau just posted 2021 population data for the more than 800 American cities larger than 50,000 people. As I predicted in a recent policy brief, the new numbers show that most dense cities lost population while low-density cities grew.

Less than 2 percent of the jobs in the Phoenix area are in downtown Phoenix, making it one of the least downtown-dependent major cities in the country. Low-density housing throughout the region makes it attractive to people wanting to avoid crowded areas. Photo by Adam Fagen.

Of America’s largest cities, expensive ones such as Los Angeles and San Francisco lost residents (with the latter declining by 6.3 percent!), but affordable cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta also declined. The largest cities whose populations grew were Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, and Jacksonville. With the exception of Austin, these are all low-density cities whose downtowns are tiny by traditional standards, each with well under 50,000 jobs before the pandemic. In other words, housing affordability was an issue, but more important was people were leaving dense areas for low-density areas. Continue reading →

Thieves Continue to Raid Container Trains

By | | Follow up
8 Comments

In the San Francisco Bay Area, flash mobs are raiding everything from Home Depots to Louis Vuitton. But in Los Angeles, as I noted here four weeks ago, thieves only have to break into containers on board stalled railroad trains.

NBC-LA news has not only documented that thieves are still breaking into containers on Union Pacific trains, it captured video of them doing it. It also contacted some of the intended recipients of the now-empty boxes to let them know why their packages were late. Continue reading →

Environmentalists Sue to Save Ferret

By | | Fish & wildlife, Follow up
2 Comments

Three environmental groups filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the Fish & Wildlife Service for its failure to recover the black-footed ferret, an animal the agency once called “the most endangered mammal in North America.” The three groups — WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Rocky Mountain Wild — argue that the agency has not taken the steps needed to save the ferret in Wyoming.

Black-footed ferrets peer out of a burrow that was probably dug by prairie dogs. The ferrets rely on prairie dogs for both food and shelter. Fish & Wildlife Service photo by Kimberly Fraser.

As I noted in a recent policy brief (and as described in much more detail in this 1996 report), the ferret relies on prairie dogs for both food and shelter, but ranchers have convinced both the federal and state governments to poison prairie dogs by the tens of thousands. For the first decade after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the leading poisoner of prairie dogs was the Fish & Wildlife Service itself, whose aggressive anti-prairie dog campaigns had already eliminated the animal from 95 to 98 percent of its historic range. Continue reading →

Mag-Lev May Be Dead; TX HSR on Life Support

By | | Follow up, Transportation
4 Comments

A Maryland circuit court judge ruled last week that the Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail Company did not have the power of eminent domain and could not stop a development on land that the maglev promoter needed to use for its proposed line. The judge rejected the company’s argument that its purchase of a franchise previously granted to the long-defunct Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway gave it the power to condemn other people’s land.

The maglev promoter didn’t actually have the money to buy the land in question, but it wanted to halt a developer from building a mixed-use development on the property, which would have made condemnation a lot more expensive when and if it has the power and money to do so. The judge said that the company’s argument contained “a lot of factual inaccuracies.”

The prospects for building a maglev in the corridor have been further hurt by announcements from local officials such as Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks that they oppose the project. The mayor’s office suggested that, since the Senate just authorized $2.4 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor, it would be foolish to back a project that threatened to take customers away from Amtrak. Continue reading →

San Jose Light-Rail Service Resumes

By | | Follow up, Transportation
3 Comments

Last week, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) resumed “limited” light-rail service for the first time since the May 26 shooting at VTA’s maintenance center. Service began on the Orange Line and part of the Green Line. A week later, part of the Blue Line opened along with another segment of the Green Line. VTA has to test tracks on each segment before it can open; some lines were lower priorities, said the agency, because they carried few riders, providing further support for the Antiplanner’s belief that light rail was the wrong technology for San Jose in the first place.

VTA closed its light-rail system for more than three months and part of the system will be closed for even longer. Photo by Minh Nguyen.

VTA claims it closed down the light-rail operations “to give employees time to heal from the traumatic experience” of the May 26 shooting. But transit advocate Eugene Bradley pointed out “that other major cities that experienced violent disruptions of transit, such as New York and London, managed to restore service within hours.” Not only did VTA not run light-rail trains for three months, for much of that time it didn’t provide light-rail riders with alternative bus services. “VTA is showing the world how to not recover from a tragedy,” said Bradley. Continue reading →

Low-Income Housing Tax Credits Database

By | | Follow up, Housing
1 Comment

Last week’s Antiplanner policy brief reviewed Seattle’s low-income housing program and found that it was mainly aimed at getting people to live in transit-oriented developments and did very little to help low-income families. The natural question to ask is whether this is a national problem or confined to Seattle and a few other cities. My hypothesis is that it is largely an issue in growth-management cities that are trying to get people to live in higher densities and replace cars with transit, cycling, and walking.

To help answer this question, I downloaded the Department of Housing & Urban Development’s LIHTC database, which lists 48,672 projects supported by tax credits since 1987 (click here to download the 18.9-MB data file or click the previous link to download a subset of the database). HUD seems to be behind as the database does not list any projects that were completed in 2019 or 2020.

Still, it includes a lot of information, including the address of each project, the number of units and how many are dedicated to low-income households, the tax credits allocated to each project, and whether other federal subsidies also went to the project (but not how much those subsidies were). Continue reading →

Can We Trust Government?

By | | Follow up
10 Comments

The Antiplanner’s friend and frequent commenter on this web site, M (for Michael) Setty, recently co-authored a response to the final chapter of The Education of an Iconoclast, “Lessons from an Iconoclast.” I’m not sure why Michael thought he needed to respond to my memoirs, but here is a brief reply.

The most important lesson, I stated, was “Don’t trust the government.” To which Michael and his co-author respond, more than once, “governments exist to maximize the satisfaction of the public from available resources.” I’m not certain that’s really why governments exist, but even if they do, that doesn’t mean they behave that way. If you assume that governments and government agencies always work they were intended to work, you’re going to be very disappointed when they don’t.

“The American Constitution is designed to be run by crooks, just as the British constitution is designed to be operated by gentlemen,” wrote Freeman Dyson in his book, Infinite in All Directions. “If ever a World Government should come into existence, it had better be a government designed to be run by crooks rather than a government designed to be run by gentlemen. Gentlemen are too often in short supply.” Continue reading →