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Category Archives: Policy brief

Housing Affordability from 1950 through 2019

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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An article in Human Progress—a project of the Cato Institute—finds that, when interest rates are taken into account, housing is actually more affordable today than it was 40 years ago. A standard measure of housing affordability divides median home prices by median family incomes. At any given point in time, areas with lower price-to-income ratios are more affordable.

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When comparing different time periods, however, mortgage interest rates must be considered. Those rates have varied in the last 40 years from under 3 percent to more than 18 percent. For a 30-year loan, the monthly payment at 18 percent is 3.5 times greater than at 3 percent. If housing really is more affordable today than it used to be, then the frequent claims that we are in a housing crisis may be as exaggerated as the claims of an infrastructure crisis. Continue reading →

How San Jose Held Up Google for $200 Million

By | | City planning, Policy brief
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Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.

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According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading →

Jane Jacobs and the Mid-Rise Mania

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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The next time you travel through a city, see if you can find many four-, five-, or six-story buildings. Chances are, nearly all of the buildings you see will be either low rise (three stories or less) or high-rise (seven stories or more). If you do find any mid-rise, four- to six-story buildings, chances are they were either built before 1910, after 1990, or built by the government.

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Before 1890, most people traveled around cities on foot. Only the wealthy could afford a horse and carriage or to live in the suburbs and enter the city on a steam-powered commuter train. Many cities had horsecars—rail cars pulled by horses—but they were no faster than walking and too expensive for most working-class people to use on a daily basis. Continue reading →

Does Transit Cost-Effectively Help the Poor?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Almost every effort to justify subsidies to urban transit makes similar claims: transit supposedly saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, promotes economic development, relieves congestion, and helps low-income people. Previous policy briefs have shown that, in all but a handful of urban areas, transit uses more energy and produces more greenhouse gases than the average car; often makes congestion worse; fails to promote economic growth; and hurts the 95 percent of low-income workers who don’t ride transit.

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But what about the 5 percent of low-income workers who do commute by transit (or, at least, did so before the pandemic)? For some transit advocates, it’s not enough that nearly 80 percent of the costs of transit are subsidized. They argue that, to truly help low-income people, transit should be free. Is transit a cost-effective way of providing mobility needed to thrive in modern cities? Continue reading →

San Diego’s Insane $163.5 Billion Plan

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then San Diego’s latest regional plan  is completely insane. The draft 2021 Regional Plan, which was released on May 28 by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), includes all of the latest planning fads: active transportation, complete streets, density, rail transit, density, transit-oriented development, microtransit, density, and vision zero. Did I mention density and rail transit?

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The plan backs up these ideas with dollars, proposing to spend more than $80 billion on transit, $9.8 billion on high-density housing districts, $4.3 billion on bike paths, and $0.0 billion on new roads. In all, the plan proposes to spend $163.5 billion over the next 30 years, more than half of which would go for transit and transit hubs. Some of this is for operating expenses, but transit capital improvements alone would cost $52 billion. Continue reading →

$85 Billion for Empty Buses and Railcars

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The future of public transit is nearly empty buses and railcars. Yet President Biden’s American Jobs Plan calls for spending $85 billion on transit. Although transit carries less than 1 percent of passenger travel in the United States, and no freight, this represents 28 percent of the funds Biden proposes to spend on transportation.

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Considering that the pandemic has cut transit ridership by more than half, while driving has recovered to 97 percent of pre-pandemic levels, this a poor, and poorly timed, use of public funds. Biden’s plan claims that spending more on transit “will ultimately reduce traffic congestion for everyone.” Other transit advocates claim that it will help low-income people as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But none of these claims are true. Continue reading →

Restoring Trust to the Highway Trust Fund

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In what some considered to be a backroom deal, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority agreed last month to give more than $500 million a year in toll revenues to New Jersey Transit, up from $164 million a year in the previous five years. The decision was a surprise to the public, as it was made with no preliminary discussion under an agenda item innocuously listed as “State Public Transportation Projects Funding Agreement.”

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This decision to use highway user fees to prop up a transit agency known for its bad management, including “nepotism, cronyism and incompetence,” further erodes the trust highway users have in the people managing state and local transportation resources. This trust is important partly because roads are mostly funded by a variety of excise taxes that don’t automatically adjust for inflation. Increasing the taxes is more politically difficult if users don’t believe that the funds will go for the facilities they thought they were paying for. Continue reading →

Making Massachusetts Housing Affordable

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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by Joshua Rosen and Randal O’Toole

Massachusetts covers 7,800 square miles of land, yet thanks to a variety of land-use rules 92 percent of its residents are confined to a fifth of that land. Even in the Boston metropolitan area, thousands of acres of open space persist. Satellite imagery reveals huge stretches of open, largely undeveloped lands as close to twenty miles from downtown Boston.

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Unlike Pacific Coast states that use urban-growth boundaries to keep people in existing urban areas, Massachusetts’ land-use patterns result from a variety of causes, including the abolition of county governments, several programs that aggressively acquire land for conservation, and large-lot zoning by the towns that control much of the land in the state. These policies and programs combine together to reduce the affordability in Boston and other Massachusetts cities. Continue reading →

Can U.S. Power Plants Support Electric Cars?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Will electric cars completely replace internal-combustion vehicles anytime soon? Are electric vehicles, whether rail or highway vehicles, truly cleaner, especially in states where most electric power comes from burning fossil fuels? Does the United States electric grid have the capacity to power the nation’s automotive fleet? A detailed look at America’s energy budgets and electrical power supply systems will help answer questions like these.

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Today’s Electrical Grid

The Department of Energy’s Monthly Energy Review shows that the leading source of electricity in the United States is natural gas, which produced 40 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2020, while coal produced 19 percent. This is a turnaround from just 15 years ago, when coal produced half of our electricity and natural gas just 19 percent. Some people blame coal’s decline on the Obama administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, but much of the credit is due to the development and widespread use of hydraulic fracturing and the low-cost natural gases it produced. Continue reading →

Amtrak Won’t Connect Us

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposes to spend $115 billion on highways that carry 87 percent of all passenger-miles in the United States and $80 billion on Amtrak that carries 0.1 percent of passenger-miles. That’s what rail advocates call “balanced transportation funding.”

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Biden’s plan “is what this nation has been waiting for,” enthuses Amtrak’s CEO. It’s certainly what many railfans–the people who collect old railroad timetables and model trains–have been waiting for. But I’m not sure many other Americans care enough about an obsolete form of travel they never use to say they have been eagerly waiting to have more deficit dollars spent on it. Continue reading →