Category Archives: City planning

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.

The New York Times has a love affair with Portland, but a recent article points to a dark side of Portland that the Antiplanner has commented on before: it is (as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser once put it) a “boutique city catering only to a small, highly educated elite.”

That means there isn’t much room in Portland for chronically low-income blacks. The black “ghetto,” as we called parts of Northeast Portland when I was growing up there, has been gentrified by yuppies who can’t afford homes elsewhere in the region’s urban-growth boundary. This has pushed blacks from rental housing in those neighborhoods, leaving just a scattering of blacks who owned their homes.

What is left “is not drug infested, but then you say, ‘Well, what happened to all the black people that were in this area?’ ” Margaret Solomon, a long-time black resident told the Times. “You don’t see any.” As California writer Joseph Perkins put it, “smart growth is the new Jim Crow.”

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