Category Archives: Planning Disasters

A recent article in The Atlantic indirectly sheds some light on Portland’s light-rail crime wave. The article notes several research studies have shown that demolition of major housing projects, such as Chicago’s Cabrini Green, was soon followed by suburban crime waves. Residents of the housing projects used section 8 vouchers to move to lower-middle-class suburbs and, in some cases, brought the crime with them.

Moving poor people from public housing to private rental housing was supposed to help them get out of poverty, meaning children would be more likely to graduate from high school and adults more likely to get a job. But a reanalysis of the research on which this claim was based found that the sample size was small and that people who moved actually worked less in their new homes than when they lived in the projects.

Portland did not have high-rise public housing projects, but it did have a concentration of low-income people who were pushed out of their neighborhoods by urban-growth-boundary-induced gentrification. Portland planner John Fregonese puts a positive spin on this, saying that “segregation is breaking down in Portland.” While it is soothing to think that Portland is getting more integrated, it does not necessarily mean the lives of the people forced out by gentrification have improved.

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After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin famously promised that New Orleans would remain a “chocolate city.” (He later apologized to anyone who took offense at the remark.)

I interpreted his promise to mean that he would make sure that low-income people who had been driven from their homes by the flood would be able to return. He hasn’t kept that promise. According to the latest report, low-income people who have been receiving section 8 rental assistance say they aren’t allowed to return to New Orleans because New Orleans is considered a “higher rent” city and they won’t be allowed to get rental assistance there.

Were it not for the planners, this neighborhood might have been rebuilt already.
Flickr photo by Ed Yourdon.

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The New York Times say the economic boom of the past eight years really wasn’t much of a boom, as American median incomes in 2007 were actually lower than they had been in 2000. So how was it a boom?

The Times implies that the rich got richer while the middle and lower classes got poorer. “We’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth,” it quotes a Harvard economist as saying.

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A great op ed in Saturday’s New York Times illustrates some of the dangers of government planning with a story about farming. The author of the article, a Minnesota farmer, made the naive mistake of responding to the market demand for local fruits and vegetables by converting 25 acres of corn fields into watermelons, tomatoes, and other vegetables.

Don’t try to grow watermelons here.
Flickr photo by Beggs.

It turns out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture forbids farmers from growing most fruits and vegetables on “corn base” lands. The farmer had to pay a stiff fine, equal to all his profits, for daring to grow watermelons instead.

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