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Category Archives: City planning

Whitest City Gets Whiter

By | | City planning, News commentary, Urban areas
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Portland should change its motto from “the city that works” to “the city that’s white.” Already the whitest big city in America in 2000, the city has gotten whiter still as poor people have been pushed from the inner city into the suburbs, as shown in this stunning series of maps.

The Antiplanner has covered this issue before, but it is worth repeating, partly because of The Oregonian‘s excellent coverage yesterday and partly because of what The Oregonian didn’t say. As Portland’s only daily paper pointed out, the city did little to help low-income minorities and did many things that hurt.

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Reining in the Tax-Gobbling Menace

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Rahm Emanuel, the newly elected fiscally conservative mayor of Chicago, wants to “overhaul” that city’s tax-increment financing program, which he says “morphed from a tool for blighted economic communities into an all-purpose vehicle.” TIF was first used in Chicago by Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s, whose goal was to help blighted neighborhoods.

Critics say that the second Mayor Daley, however, used TIF as a “private slush fund” to reward developers and punish disobedient aldermen. Chicago’s 180 TIF districts cover nearly a third of the city and siphon $500 million a year away from schools and other programs.

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Ending Urban Redevelopment

By | | City planning, Follow up, News commentary
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Despite pressure from cities, Jerry Brown stands firm in his proposal to end redevelopment agencies, a plan he says will immediately save the state $1.7 billion a year, and more than double that after 2012.


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Meanwhile, the Idaho Freedom Foundation publishes a report proposing to eliminate urban renewal in that state. Urban-renewal agencies in Idaho collect more than $50 million in property taxes that could otherwise go to schools and other agencies. The big savings will be in stopping the growth in urban-renewal districts, which Idaho cities are creating at the rate of five per year.

Spend It While You’ve Got It

By | | City planning, Follow up
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Last week, California Governor Jerry Brown said that the state’s financial problems are so bad that it should end urban-renewal subsidies. So the state’s urban-renewal agencies have selflessly stepped up and turned over surplus funds to the state to help it solve its financial problems.

Just kidding. Instead, redevelopment agencies all over the state have decided to blow their budgets by committing as much of their funds as possible before the state can take control.
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This is no surprise and it shouldn’t dampen efforts to revoke urban-renewal powers. Because most of today’s urban-renewal tax revenues are dedicated to paying off urban-renewal bonds, the greatest benefit from ending urban renewal will be in stopping the sale of any further bonds.

Save the States by Eliminating Urban Renewal

By | | City planning, News commentary
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One of Jerry Brown’s first acts after taking office as California’s new/old governor was to propose to eliminate the state’s 425 urban redevelopment agencies. These agencies spend more than $5 billion a year on urban renewal subsidies that are largely unnecessary, and Brown hopes he can somehow tap into that money to help the state cover its financial deficit, currently estimated to be about $28 billion.

The redevelopment agencies are mostly funded out of tax-increment financing (TIF), which means the money they spend would otherwise go to schools and other services, many of which also receive state funding. Every dollar that schools get that would otherwise go to urban renewal is a dollar that the state doesn’t have to spend to fund the schools.

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Movie Review: Road House

By | | City planning
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The Antiplanner doesn’t ordinarily review movies, but then, not many movies cover the dark side of urban renewal. Someone once called Road House, featuring the late Patrick Swayze, the “cheesiest movie ever made,” but they must not have been aware of the political subtext.

In the movie, Brad Wesley (played by Ben Gazzara) is the evil executive director of the urban-renewal district for a small town named Jasper, Missouri (which he calls an “improvement district”). The district taxes all of the businesses in the town and uses the money to make investments that attract new businesses. Like most advocates of tax-subsidized economic development, Wesley takes credit for all the good things that happen in town. “J.C. Penney is coming here because of me,” he brags, as if J.C. Penney didn’t ordinarily locate in small towns like Jasper.

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Where Do We Draw the Line?

By | | City planning, News commentary
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“How much is sustainability worth?” asks Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Nigel Jaquiss. “Try $65 million in public money.” That’s how much taxpayers will be spending on a $72 million “green” building in downtown Portland. At $462 a square foot, it will be “perhaps the most expensive office space ever built in Portland.”

The director of the Oregon Environmental Council defends the building as something that can “leverage long-term outcomes,” whatever that means. But she would defend it, since the state is promising OEC, 1000 Friends of Oregon, and other left-wing environmental groups office space in the building at low rents that are guaranteed to stay fixed for decades.

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Portland Urban Renewal Scam

By | | City planning, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner’s former hometown of Portland, Oregon, is proposing to create a new urban renewal district that is so gerrymandered that blogger Jack Bogdanski suspects it must cover at least 50 scams.

Most of Portland’s previous urban renewal districts are pretty regular, following roughly rectangular boundaries. The proposed new district has fingers going in all directions, often connected to other parts of the district by an area no wider than a street. Some of the fingers overlap existing or lapsed districts.

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Despite TIF, the Bells Don’t Toll

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Tualatin, a distant suburb of Portland, is the proud owner of three large and expensive bells that may never toll (there were supposed to be four, but one was stolen). The bells were purchased with TIF (tax-increment finance) money as a part of a $12 million subsidy to Tualatin Commons, a New Urbanist development. But the city ran out of subsidy before it could build a tower for the bells.

A proposal to extend the urban-renewal district for another 25 years, which would have provided the millions needed for a bell tower and other inane projects, was killed when the local fire district objected to the loss of its tax revenues and other taxpayers agreed that the project was frivolous. But the city had already bought the bells for $150,000 (which includes architectural drawings for the bell tower), so now it is stuck with four brass elephants.

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TIF & Crony Capitalism

By | | City planning
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Speaking of crony capitalism (as the Antiplanner was doing last week), one of the biggest sources of such urban corruption is tax-increment financing (TIF). TIF was invented in the 1950s to help cities revitalize neighborhoods that were supposedly so blighted that no one would gentrify them without government support. Today, such blight (which resulted when people left high-density inner cities for low-density suburbs) is mostly a thing of the past.

Urban planners use TIF to promote their social agendas, most recently favoring high-density, mixed-use developments (which is ironic since TIF was originally used to clear such developments that no one wanted). City managers see TIF as a way of boosting their budgets at the expense of schools and other entities that they see as competitors for the limited amount of tax dollars that property tax payers (and, in some states, sales tax payers) are willing to cough up. Mayors and city councilors see TIF as a way of rewarding developers who contributed to their political campaigns, which is where the crony capitalism comes in.

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