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Miami Affordable Housing Vice

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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By Elijah Gullett

Note: As a follow-up to my report on low-income housing tax credits in Seattle, I asked Elijah Gullett, who is a student in public policy at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, to look at affordable housing programs in Miami. This is his report.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

In 2007, journalist Debbie Cenziper won the Pulitzer prize for her Miami Herald investigative series, House of Lies. Cenziper revealed how Oscar Rivero, a Miami developer, ripped off taxpayers by promising the construction of affordable housing units and inflating construction costs for his own profit. In 2016, Lloyd Boggio and Matthew Greer, former CEOs of Carlisle Development Group, were found guilty of defrauding the government for affordable housing construction. Despite Carlisle being praised for their work in constructing “high-quality” low-income housing in Miami, they stole tens of millions of taxpayer dollars by inflating construction costs and making backroom deals with contractors. Even more recently, Pinnacle Housing Group and Related Group have been investigated for padding construction costs to steal money from government programs. 

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Mileage-Based User Fees for Highway Finance

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Six years ago, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) announced that it was inviting up to 5,000 people to voluntarily join its mileage-based user fee program. The Antiplanner rushed to be among the first to apply, which turned out to be unnecessary as, after two years, only 745 vehicles were participating in the program.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

That number is likely to increase soon, as the state has imposed a stiff vehicle-registration fee on electric and other fuel-efficient cars, a fee people can waive if they add their car to the mileage-based fee program. Annual fees for electric cars will go from $20 to $153; fees for cars rated to get better than 40 miles per gallon jump from $20 to $76 per year. Continue reading →

Housing Affordability and the Pandemic

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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The median price of homes in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, grew by $100,000 in February, reports the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. That means prices were growing by $25,000 a week. The good news is that these are New Zealand dollars, which are only worth about 72 cents U.S., which means prices grew by “only” US$18,000 a week. The bad news is Auckland’s median prices had already reached $1 million (U.S.$720,000) in January, so February’s price increase was only about 10 percent.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Like many American cities with sky-high housing prices, Auckland has an urban-growth boundary, locally known as the Metropolitan Urban Limit, which it adopted in 1998. Advocates claimed that this limit would reduce transportation, utilities, and other costs. Ten years later a former Auckland city planner could only say that the limit was successful because it contained growth within the limit. That’s like saying schools are successful because they contain children. Continue reading →

Applying Value Engineering to Transit Projects

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 1997, Tidewater Regional Transit—which served Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia—proposed to build an 18-mile light-rail line between the two cities. Virginia Beach voters, however, rejected the plan. So, in 2000, the transit agency (which since 1999 had been known as Hampton Roads Transit) decided to build 7.4 miles from downtown Norfolk to the Norfolk-Virginia Beach city limit. In 2003, the project was estimated to cost less than $200 million and attract 10,500 riders a day.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Few places were less suited to rail transit, which is mainly designed to bring lots of commuters into job-rich downtowns. Although the Hampton Roads area has nearly 1.5 million people, it doesn’t have any large job-filled downtowns. According to Wendell Cox’s analysis of central business districts, downtown Norfolk had fewer than 25,000 jobs in the mid- to late-2000s, and fewer than 800 of them took transit to work. Continue reading →

Are Greater Densities Worthwhile?

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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An article in The Urbanist last month breathlessly reveals that the city of Seattle can be built up into a city of 2 million people without a lot of high-rise development. All that is necessary to achieve that growth, the article claims, is to rezone single-family neighborhoods to allow midrise apartment buildings.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

As of 2019, Seattle had slightly more than 750,000 people living at about 9,000 people per square mile, making it the sixth-densest of the nation’s 50 largest cities. The Urbanist proposal represents a 165 percent increase in population resulting in densities close to 24,000 people per square mile, denser than any city in America other than New York City and a few of its suburbs. Continue reading →

The Dark Side of Japan’s Bullet Trains

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics. This exposed an international audience to the latest in Japanese technology in the form of the fastest trains in the world with top speeds of 130 miles per hour and average speeds as high as 86 miles per hour. These quickly became the envy of other countries, leading even the United States Congress to pass a law promoting high-speed trains in 1965.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Today, salarymen and tourists ride shinkansen the full length of Japan’s main island of Honshu as well as on the outer islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. However, there is a dark side to the shinkansen. Like Darth Vader, who started out as a nice little boy who loved speed but whose life was corrupted by a power-hungry politician, the shinkansen was warped by politicians and ended up doing more harm than good to Japan’s economy. Continue reading →

The Law of Large Proportions Saves Energy

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Americans drove more miles in 2019 than the previous year but used less energy to do so, according to data released by the Department of Energy last week. This isn’t a new trend: American energy consumption for highway passenger vehicles has declined 12 percent since 2007 despite the fact that we are driving 7 percent more miles.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The data were published in edition 39 of the Transportation Energy Data Book, which has information all modes of transportation, often going back to 1970. The data in the book show that not only is our energy consumption for transportation declining, the carbon footprint of motor vehicles is also falling, which helped the United States reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent since 2005. The book also has information about petroleum production around the world, auto ownership for many other countries, toxic air pollution, and other energy- and transportation-related topics. Continue reading →

Are Accidents of History Irreversible?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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There’s a popular belief that the federal government began subsidizing public transit and Amtrak to protect the environment and help provide mobility to low-income people. In fact, while energy and poverty later became excuses for continuing subsidies that had already begun, neither of these issues were on Congress’ collective mind when it began subsidizing transit in 1964 and created Amtrak in 1970. Instead, both of these programs are little more than accidents of history.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

Transit: Saving Big-City Downtowns

The environment wasn’t even an issue when Congress created the Urban Mass Transit Administration and started giving federal grants to local transit agencies in 1964. Nor was helping poor people a major concern. Instead, the primary goal of federal transit funding was to protect the value of downtown properties in a few big cities. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: Subsidies Up, Ridership Down

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The transit industry carried 37.5 percent as many riders in December 2020 as it had in December 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is a slight increase over the 36.9 percent carried in November. For the year as a whole, it ended up carrying 46.1 percent as many riders as it had transported in 2019.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The industry had begun the year carrying about 6 to 7 percent more riders than the first two months of 2019, suggesting that it might have been about to turn around the decline that it had experienced over the previous five years. The pandemic foiled this recovery, and the industry avoided total disaster only by the American Public Transportation Association and transit agencies convincing Congress to give transit $25 billion in April and $12 billion in December, with more on the way. This has taught the transit industry a perverse lesson: it doesn’t have to actually carry many passengers to continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading →

Increasing Safety, Improving the Economy

By | | Policy brief
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Eighteen months ago, an Antiplanner policy brief scrutinized the recent increase in pedestrian traffic fatalities and concluded that much of that increase was due to risky behavior. Most of the increased fatal crashes took place at night and involved pedestrians entering or crossing streets outside of designated areas. Much of the increase also involved either pedestrians or drivers who were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The policy brief concluded that road diets, complete streets, and similar planning fads were the wrong solutions as they didn’t address the real problems. Policies such as Vision Zero, which advocate wholesale reductions in speed limits, threaten the timely distribution of goods and movements of people, thus harming urban economies, without necessarily addressing the real causes of traffic fatalities. Continue reading →