Category Archives: City planning

Sigh. Another day, another junk science paper from the smart-growth advocates. This time it is a paper titled Walking the Walk, which argues that the fact that housing prices are higher in so-called walkable neighborhoods proves that “consumers and housing markets attach a positive value to living within easy walking distance of shopping, services, schools and parks.”

In fact, all the paper proves is that the person who wrote it doesn’t understand basic economics. The report is junk science because it confuses cost with demand and presumes that correlation equals causation.

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Ask progressives what they think is the nation’s most-progressive city, and many are likely to mention San Francisco. Not coincidentally, the progressive SF Weekly argues that San Francisco is also the nation’s worst-managed city.

Welcome to San Francisco, where per capita budgets climb halfway to the stars.

The city spends more than $8,000 per capita, compared with less than $7,200 by New York and less than $3,000 by Philadelphia and Denver. The Weekly suggests that most of the difference is waste. (In San Francisco’s defense, San Francisco is a combined city-county government and its budget includes a lot of services, such as public transit, not included in Philadelphia or Denver budgets.)

Still, “even other liberal places wouldn’t put up with the degree of dysfunction they have in San Francisco,” says faithful Antiplanner ally Joel Kotkin. “In Houston” — which both Kotkin and the Antiplanner admire — “I assume you’d get shot” if you did so poorly.

There are a lot of problems with the city, but one of the biggest is public employees unions. Unions were probably important in providing workers with a balance against large corporations. But the potential corruption of unions with the dysfunction of government is a recipe for disaster.

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It is hard not to gloat over the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s infamous Kelo decision. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out recently, the city of New London, Connecticut spent $78 million condemning people’s homes and bulldozing them away, and the development that was supposed to happen in that area has flopped and looks like it may never take place. (With the help of many supporters, Kelo’s own home was disassembled and moved to a new location.)

Pfizer, the company whose “world-class” research and development offices were driving New London’s plan for condos and other trendy developments, recently merged with another company and has announced it is moving out of New London. As a result, even after the economy recovers, the development that New London wanted to put on Susette Kelo’s neighborhood will probably never happen.

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The Congress for the New Urbanism is holding its annual convention, which means it is time once again for the New York Times to get suckered into publishing a story about how rail transit spurs development. The Antiplanner calls bullshit on that.

The article opens with a heartwarming tale of how light rail turned a dusty cow town in Texas into a thriving, New Urban community. Naturally, the writer never mentions the tax-increment financing that supported this redevelopment.

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David Brooks sarcastically applauds the Obama administration’s willingness to cavalierly order banks, auto manufacturers, and health care providers around. And it appears that, in nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Obama was doing more than finding an Hispanic woman to balance out the court. He was finding someone sympathetic to the idea that government should be able to push around private businesses and property owners.

As Richard Epstein, the nation’s preeminent scholar on property rights and the Fifth Amendment, writes in Forbes, Sotomayer has even less sympathy for property rights than the justices who voted for the Kelo decision. In 2006, Sotomayer was on a panel that reviewed a case known as Didden vs. the Village of Port Chester, New York.

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Cheerful news amid the gloom! The economy has tanked so badly that the city of Petaluma, California, is thinking of shutting down its planning department.

As readers of The Best-Laid Plans know, Petaluma was the first city in the country to try to control its growth by limiting the number of building permits issued each year. Curiously, though, the city’s planning department is funded out of developer fees. That’s okay as long as some development is going on, but now there is next to none.

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I wonder if the planners realize how ironic this is? Probably not.