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Category Archives: City planning

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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Throwing Good Money After Bad

By | | City planning, News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is planning to spend $7 million upgrading the 24-year-old Rockwood station in the city of Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. TriMet officials hope the improvements will “leverage investment in transit into nearby development opportunities” in that neighborhood. Fat chance, especially since it was the light rail that killed the neighborhood in the first place.

The Rockwood Fred Meyer in 2000. Note the light-rail train in the background.

For 45 years, the center of the Rockwood neighborhood was a Fred Meyer store, a “supercenter” selling groceries, clothing, variety, and hardware. Fred Meyer also leased storefronts to other businesses such as coffee shops and locksmiths. When Fred Meyer spent $400,000 remodeling the store after TriMet opened the light-rail line in 1986, TriMet triumphantly counted it as an investment inspired by the light rail. Never mind the fact that Fred Meyer bragged on its web site that it had remodeled all of its 130 stores at about the same time.

The truth was, things were not going well at the Rockwood store. In January 2003, Fred Meyer shocked the neighborhood by closing it even though it was obligated to pay a lease on the site for another 10 years. The store “was in decline for a number of years,” a Fred Meyer official told the Oregonian (article available to those with access to Infoweb). “It was in a decline before the last remodel.” This was the only time in the chain’s history that it closed a store without immediately reopening a replacement nearby.

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The Junk Science of Walkability

By | | City planning, News commentary
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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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The Worst-Managed City

By | | City planning, News commentary
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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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Climate Change About Behavioral Change

By | | City planning
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The Antiplanner is increasingly convinced that most believers in anthropomorphic climate change care less about saving the planet than they do about changing people’s behavior. Climate change is just an excuse for using the power of government to force such changes.

We can see this in the city of Portland’s Climate Action Plan, which is all about changing behavior. The plan aims to reduce per capita electricity usage by 25 percent and per capita driving by an unbelievable two-thirds by 2050.

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