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Category Archives: City planning

Job-Killing Living Wages

By | | City planning
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Washington DC’s city council has “tentatively” passed an ordinance that would raise the minimum wage from $8.25 ($1 more than the federal minimum wage) to $12.50 per hour. But this ordinance only applies to “non-union shops that are at least 75,000 square feet and whose parent companies gross above $1 billion annually.” Guess what company fits that description.

The left excuses this discrimination by calling it a “living wage” ordinance. But why is it that only employees of WalMart, and not employees of smaller retail shops, supermarkets, restaurants, or other businesses?

Ironically, over the last decade three successive Washington DC mayors worked hard to attract WalMart to build stores in inner-city neighborhoods. WalMart was reluctant to build in those areas due to crime, but finally agreed to open six stores in the district. “We’ve been praying for food in this neighborhood for about 40 years,” said the resident of one neighborhood where WalMart was planning to build.

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A Legal Blow to Cities That Want to Take Your Property

By | | City planning
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On Tuesday, June 25, the Supreme Court issued a decision that helps protect people’s property rights from greedy municipalities. That decision ticked off Vermont Law School Professor John Echeverria, who considers it a blow to “sustainable development.” Like many recent property rights cases, the decision was made on a five-to-four vote.

In the case, a Florida property owner named Coy Koontz Sr. wanted to fill and develop 3.7 acres of wetlands. To mitigate the wetland fill, Koontz offered to put 11 acres of his property (about 75 percent of the total) under a conservation easement. But the St. Johns River Water Management District denied the permit, saying it wanted either 13.9 acres of Koontz’s land (leaving him less than an acre, or just 5 percent of the total) for development) or for Koontz to spend a bunch of his money helping the district restore wetlands elsewhere.

Koontz took this to court, citing the Supreme Court’s Nollan and Dolan decisions. In those cases, permits were granted on the condition that the property owners give some of their land to the public. The Supreme Court had held that this was an unconstitutional taking of private property.

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They’ll Do It Every Time

By | | City planning, News commentary
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A middle-class urban planner sees a working-class neighborhood and says, “I wouldn’t want to live there. That neighborhood must be blighted.” So the planner convinces the city to spend hundreds of millions of dollars revitalizing the neighborhood: clearing older buildings and replacing them with new high-density, mixed-use developments that the middle-class urban planner wouldn’t want to live in but thinks others should enjoy, often tying such neighborhoods together with a billion-dollar rail line.

Lo and behold, the plan “works” in the sense that housing in the area is now more expensive and suddenly the working-class families are priced out of the market. So the middle-class planner says, “What a terrible shame. We need to spend more money subsidizing affordable housing.” This makes the planner feel less guilty even though someone else’s money is used to subsidize the housing and the people getting the subsidized housing are most likely friends of the developer who just graduated from college and are therefore “low income” at the moment even though they can expect to be high income soon.
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Then comes along a middle-class journalist who doesn’t understand the problem. The problem is not, as this article suggests, that rail transit has boosted property values (which it hasn’t, really–see this post to understand what is going on). The problem is that government should have kept out of the development business in the first place.

Sacramento Streetcar Scam

By | | City planning, Transportation
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Another day; another city getting scammed by the streetcar mafia. In this case, it is Sacramento, a city that has built 37 miles of light-rail lines and seen transit’s share of commuting fall from 4.1 percent in 1980, before light rail, to 3.2 percent in 2010.

In 2006, Sacramento’s metropolitan transportation plan admitted that, despite past plans focusing on “luring drivers out of their autos,” the share of transit riders was decreasing; and despite building no new roads and seeing huge increases in congestion, the amount of auto driving had doubled since 1980 (see page 3). So naturally, the plan recommended more of the same.

Apparently, that still didn’t work, because now they want to try something new. Since light rail wasn’t fixing any problems, they want to build 18 miles of streetcar lines costing $816 million, or $45 million a mile. The plan calls for a $125-$135 million “starter line” of 2.55 miles that will also share 0.75 miles of rails with light rail, reducing the light-rail line’s capacity to move people, which isn’t an issue because so few people ride the light rail.

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Rearranging the Park Benches

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Our cities are in trouble. Most have huge unfunded pension and health-care obligations. Their infrastructure is old and so poorly maintained that it can’t power a football stadium for the full length of a game. Their schools have significantly lower high-school graduation rates than the suburbs, even after accounting for differences in incomes. Housing in many cities is unaffordable, roads are congested, and jobs are fleeing, even in supposedly urban industries such as high tech and finance.

Urban planner Richard Florida has a solution: President Obama should create a new federal Department of Cities. That’s right up there with rearranging the benches at Battery Park before Superstorm Sandy hits.

Like many planners, Florida believes problems can be solved from the top down. He is famous for urging cities to adopt policies that make housing unaffordable, forcing poor and moderate-income people out, thus increasing average incomes and making it look like the cities have attracted high-income “creative” people.

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Neglecting the Basics

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Portland is proud of being a livable city. Sure, its streets are crumbling, city buildings are neglected, and its schools are crappy. But don’t worry; it’s a livable city.

The Portland Building in August 1982. Photo by Steve Morgan.

A building so ugly that Willamette Week newspaper uses the “ugly” tag for any article that refers to it.

The Antiplanner noted last February that the city’s transportation bureau elected to give up on street paving and repair so that it could fund streetcars. The latest news is that the city isn’t even property maintaining its buildings, including the internationally famous (for being ugly) Portland building. The city has just over half the money it needs to keep this and other city buildings maintained.

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Cities Growing Faster Than Suburbs–Not!

By | | City planning, News commentary, Useful Data
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A return to the cities and rejection of the suburbs is an article of faith among smart-growth planners, and their wishful thinking is often supported by breathless media reports. The latest news comes from 2011 Census estimates, which the Wall Street Journal reports as revealing that the “cities outpace suburbs in growth.” MSNBC reports that “cities grow more than suburbs [for the] first time in 100 years.”

What do the numbers actually say? Of the 51 largest metropolitan areas, the percentage growth of 26 center cities was higher than the percentage growth of their suburbs. Why 51? Maybe because if they only looked at the 50 largest areas, exactly half of their cities would have grown faster than the suburbs and then they couldn’t say “most.” The percentage growth of central cities in all 51 of the largest areas combined was also higher than of their suburbs, but not by much: 1.03 percent vs. 0.93 percent.

That’s percentage growth, and if that continued as a long-term trend, it might be meaningful. But in fact it was only one year, from 2010 to 2011 (and the 2011 numbers are only estimates). And since, in most cases, the central cities make up only a small portion of the metropolitan area, faster percentage growth doesn’t translate into a large numeric growth. For example, Atlanta grew by 2.4 percent while its suburbs grew by only 1.3 percent. But Atlanta’s 2.4-percent gain means 10,040 new residents, while the suburbs 1.3 percent gain means 62,869 new residents. In other words, Atlanta suburbs actually gained more than six times as many people as Atlanta itself.

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If They Only Had a Streetcar

By | | City planning
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Kansas City sold $295 million worth of TIF bonds to revitalize a part of the city known as the Power & Light District. The developer who benefitted from this money says “the development was successful as part of a broader effort to re-energize the city’s downtown.” Unfortunately, tax revenues are less than a third of what was projected, with the result that city taxpayers are having to make up the difference (as if city taxpayers wouldn’t be paying for it anyway).

The city naturally blames the problems on the recession. But recessions happen. Here’s the difference between private developments and government-subsidized developments: If the private developer guesses wrong, only the investors lose. If the government planners guess wrong, every taxpayer in the city or region loses.
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The Wall Street Journal article about this boondoggle doesn’t mention it, but Kansas City wants to spend another $100 million on a two-mile-long streetcar line connecting Power & Light with other parts of downtown Kansas City. No doubt that will fix the problem. While they are at it, how about an aerial tramway, maybe a new sports stadium or two? Just what the city taxpayers need: more places to sink their money.

Department of Irony

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Officials from Aurora, Colorado are in a tizzy because someone conducted some focus groups to see what taxpayers thought of a $300 million subsidy to a proposed hotel. Such focus groups “violate the ethics code for economic development organizations in the region,” said Tom Clark, the executive vice-president of Denver’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC).

Apparently, it is perfectly ethical to steal money that taxpayers had allocated to schools, fire, and police and give it to a private developer, but it is unethical to ask those taxpayers how they fell about such theft. Colorado’s “taxpayer bill of rights” prevents governments from raising taxes by more than a certain percentage each year–but tax-increment financing, the main source of subsidies for the proposed hotel, is exempt from this law.

“You can’t work against your neighbor, and you can’t run around them,” Clark said. “If you do, you’re subject to permanent expulsion from the Metro Denver EDC.” Of course, it is always possible that some people don’t want to be a part of Clark’s cozy little club of thieves.

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Now, This Is Ridiculous

By | | City planning, Housing
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What’s the most ridiculous zoning rule or decision you’ve ever heard of? Here’s a candidate: Alexandria, Virginia (which wants a Portland-like streetcar) has told property owners in one neighborhood that replacement of rusty chain-link fences violates the city’s historic preservation ordinance.

“While many feel that [chain-link] fences have negative connotations, this material has played an important role in the development of mid-century vernacular housing and their cultural landscape,” the city’s historic preservation staff noted. “By eradicating this ‘simple fencing solution,’ the applicant would be removing an important contextual clue to the original occupants of this neighborhood.”

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