Category Archives: News commentary

One of the predictable consequences of intrusive government land-use regulation is that people come to view the regulations as entitlements. So, when someone builds an innocent treehouse for their children, some neighbor is likely to complain that the treehouse violates city zoning laws.

In New York, neighbors complained when someone built a treehouse less than 40 feet from the property line in a zone requiring 40-foot setbacks. The city said the ordinance applied to any building more than 8 feet tall. The treehouse was less than 8 feet tall, but because it was in a tree the top was more than 8 feet off the ground. If this meant it was 8 feet tall, it was an “accessory building” and required a permit. In this case, the town zoning board ruled (in 1985) that it was not.

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Smart growthers and other rail nuts love to talk about how rising fuel prices are leading people to ride mass transit. The truth is that, in March, 2008, driving experienced one of the greatest declines in history (from March of the previous year), but mass transit ridership also declined. So people are hardly taking transit as a substitute for driving.

Instead, says Nielsen, people are spending less on discretionary items, combining trips, and buying in-store brands instead of name-brand items. Riding transit? Not so much.

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Smart-growth planners say we need to save energy by reducing our driving. James Howard Kunstler goes so far as to say, “No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it.”

Fortunately, some brighter people have different ideas. T. Boone Pickens has proposed the Pickens Plan, which calls for substituting wind and other renewables for all electrical generation, thus freeing up natural gas (which is the source of about 22 percent of our electricity) for transportation.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, has a slightly different plan. He would replace many of the petroleum-fueled vehicles on the road today with electric cars and light trucks.

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Reason magazine features a debate between three nominally libertarian thinkers over the appropriate response to global warming: cap and trade, carbon tax, or deregulate the economy. Ron Bailey, one of the debaters, has gone from ardent global warming skeptic, to something is happening but we probably aren’t causing it, to okay warming is real but we can’t do anything about it. Now he supports a carbon tax.

Lynne Kiesling, an economist from Northwestern University, supports cap and trade, but never really says why she favors it over a carbon tax.

Fred Smith, the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that either of these approaches are likely to cost more than global warming itself — if global warming is happening, which Smith is almost willing to admit, though he thinks it will hardly be catastrophic. Instead, he argues that the world needs to deregulate — deregulate trade, deregulate electricity, deregulate biotechnology. This way, we can build wealth and technology and be ready for any warming (or cooling) that happens.

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The Antiplanner is not a conservative, so I can hardly be an Obamacon (a conservative who supports Obama). I am not even certain I support Obama. But this article in the San Francisco Chronicle certainly captures how I feel about the current election.

Obama seems pretty fiscally liberal. But, as Cato Institute executive David Boaz says some libertarians are thinking, “Do you think Obama will increase spending by $1 trillion, because that’s what Republicans did over the past two presidential terms. So really, how much worse can he be?”

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One of the standard tenets of New Urbanism is that suburbanites have lost their sense of community and social capital, and that higher-density housing can restore these things. These ideas received a boost when Robert Putnam’s 1996 book, Bowling Alone, argued that America was experiencing a severe decline in social capital, and blamed much of this decline on the suburbs.

Now, Rich Carson, who calls himself the Contrarian Planner, points out in a new article that Putnam’s thesis is simply wrong. Instead, Carson observes, recent research from UC Berkeley has found that people living in denser areas have fewer close friends and fewer soclal interactions than people in low-density areas. In fact, as density increases by 10 percent, social interactions decline by 10 percent.

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The latest dumb idea for saving the planet is being promoted in many Canadian and a few American cities: banning drive-through restaurant windows. Calgary is thinking of it. So are Windsor and several other Canadian cities.

Drive-thru McDonalds in Wai Gao Qiao, China. Click photo for complete story.
Flickr photo by McChronicles.

In the U.S., Madison is thinking of it. So is Leesburg, Virginia. San Luis Obispo actually banned drive thrus 25 years ago. Even though an informal poll found that 63 percent of residents think the ban should be lifted, the city council decided not to do it because it would be “unfair to all the businesses that have opened up over the last 25 years” — as if they couldn’t add a drive thru if they wanted one.

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