According to the mayor of Gresham, Oregon, 40 percent of robberies and drug crimes — as well as 80 percent of gang-related police calls — in his city take place within a quarter mile of a light-rail station. He made this statement in an interview with conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson.
Vandalism and burgleries are also a problem, according to this article in the Oregonian.
The Antiplanner is back home after a tiring road trip, so today’s post will be brief. But it is worth noting a couple of op eds that appeared about the southern California wildfires.
First, Richard Halsey, of the California Chaparral Institute, has an opinion piece in the San Diego Tribune. Second, the Orange County Register published an article by the Antiplanner.
Yesterday’s post on wildfire suggested that it will take awhile for the “new new wisdom” to be accepted. Last night’s CBS News proved my point.
A report (annoying ad comes before the news report) from CBS reporter Sandra Hughes showed hundreds of homes built to “shelter-in-place” standards and found that “not one home had even been touched by the flames.” So what does Hughes learn from this? That people should not be allowed to build to shelter-in-place standards because it will encourage them to build in fire-prone areas.
This morning’s post on fire mentioned “shelter in place,” in which homes are made sufficiently firewise that people can safely remain in the homes during a firestorm. Five neighborhoods in the San Diego area were approved as shelter-in-place communities. The fires touched those neighborhoods, but not a single home was scorched.
TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, has posted on its web site a response to the Antiplanner’s article, Debunking Portland. The response makes six points:
1. Light rail is “a well-considered decision” made 25 years ago (TriMet says 55, but that is obviously a typo).
2. Portlanders love light rail.
3. Light rail is cheap.
4. Light rail is fast.
5. Light rail “translates into more density, less parking, and new mixes of commercial and residential development.”
6. Light rail is a great investment in the future.
The laugh is on the taxpayers who had to shell out $1.65 billion, and rising, to build Portland’s light-rail lines.
Here are the Antiplanner’s replies.
Paul Weyrich is a conservative’s conservative. His Free Congress Foundation supports fiscal responsibility, opposes activist judges, and has made the “traditional family” a major “policy issue.”
Weyrich also loves trains. The Free Congress Foundation also sponsors the New Electric Railway Journal, which promotes light-rail transit and streetcars. I’m a rail nut too, and so are Bob Poole, Joseph Vranich, and a lot of other people who are skeptical of federal funding for rail transit. Weyrich, however, supports such funding.
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Siemens, the maker of light-rail vehicles, has admitted to finding $2.3 billion in “suspicious transactions” — meaning probable bribes — on its books. Company salespeople apparently bribed government officials around the world to get them to buy Siemens products.
The German government recently fined the company about $300 million for the $635 million in suspicious transactions that it had previously reported. Now it appears this has only scratched the surface of the company’s moral problems.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked what we should call Portland’s transit and real-estate development mafia if not the light-rail mafia. Loyal opponent Dan S suggested the “greater choice mafia.” This, of course, reflects the repeated claim of smart-growth planners that all they are doing is offering people more housing and transportation choices.
Bull. If someone wants to live in high-density housing, they can find it. Most Americans don’t, so there isn’t as much high-density housing as low density. But it is there. Planners want to turn it around — to get more people living in high densities than in low. That’s not offering people a choice — it is taking away America’s preferred type of housing from a large share of American families.
Portland is supposed to be one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the nation. But after trying to negotiate the city’s skinny streets (made skinnier by traffic calming) and getting honked at by the drivers of some of its fat buses, I find it to be a pretty hostile place for cyclists. Others, too, find Portland an unfriendly place, particularly businesses trying to grow while negotiating numerous regulations and restrictions.
Is Portland a Business-Unfriendly Environment?
In 1970, Portland was the headquarters of several Fortune 500 corporations, including Georgia-Pacific and Louisiana-Pacific. One by one, they all left, claiming that Portland had a business-unfriendly environment. Only Nike, located in an unincorporated part of Portland’s suburbs, remains — and only barely, as Nike threatened to move out when land-use planners tried to force it to turn its office campus into a high-density residential development.
