Category Archives: Regional planning

Winnipeg is the most affordable major housing market in Canada. According to Wendell Cox’s 2024 International Housing Affordability report, the average price of a 1,500-square-foot home in Winnipeg is $310,000, compared with $1.1 million in Toronto and $1.4 million in Vancouver.

Click image to download a 38.5-MB PDF of this 159-page plan.

Don’t worry: Winnipeg planners have a plan to bring Winnipeg housing prices up to Toronto if not Vancouver levels. It’s called the 20-50 plan and it calls for adopting all of the land-use policies that have made Vancouver a mecca for anyone who can afford to spend well over a million dollars on a home. Continue reading →

Louisiana is the worst state to live in, according to self-storage company Pink Storage. The company has rated the 50 states using sixteen different criteria including income, congestion, housing, education, crime, and life expectancy. California is the fifth-worst, thanks to its low housing affordability, followed by South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, and the afore-mentioned Louisiana.

Any state that has scenery such as this doesn’t look too unlivable to me. Photo by glynn424.

Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee score poorly on income while Arizona is mediocre to poor in several categories including high school graduation rates, number of police per capita (though its crime rates aren’t particularly high), and utility bills (to pay for air conditioning no doubt). Other states at the low end of the scale include Texas, Nevada, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alabama. Continue reading →

“America’s treasured cities,” writes semi-libertarian Jeffrey Tucker, are in “grave danger.” He believes that people are leaving cities to get away from “forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status” due to the pandemic. He doesn’t consider the possibility that people didn’t want to be in cities in the first place and were all too happy to use the pandemic as an excuse to leave.

Do we treasure living in the cities or the suburbs? Photo by Andreas Praefcke.

Before the pandemic, urbanists were chortling about the “triumph of the city.” World population data showed that urban areas were growing while rural numbers were shrinking. In citing these data, urbanists conflated “urban areas” and “cities” to make their case, effectively arguing that more people moving to the suburban parts of urban areas meant that more people wanted to live in the dense central cities. Continue reading →

Land-use and transportation planning is supposed to follow a rational planning process. That process includes defining the problem that needs to be solved, identifying alternative solutions, evaluating the alternatives, developing a final plan based on the best alternative or combination of alternatives, implementing the plan, monitoring the effects to see how well reality matches planning assumptions, and using the results of that monitoring as feedback into future plans.

This 1969 book describes the rational planning process on page 95.

The rational planning model has been around since at least 1969. Yet today, more than 50 years later, hardly any government agency follows this model. Instead, most government plans I’ve reviewed follow what can only be called an irrational planning process. Continue reading →

A Pew poll released Wednesday found that 57 percent of Americans say they would rather live in a neighborhood with larger houses spaced further apart, even if it means driving to stores or restaurants, as opposed to one with smaller homes closer together but with shops and cafes within walking distance. That’s up from 53 percent in 2019 but down from 60 percent in 2021.

Do you prefer this . . .

The survey also found that young people and Democrats were more likely to want walkable communities while older people and Republicans were more likely to want more drivable communities. As with the general results, all groups tended to move towards a preference to low-density areas after the pandemic, and have partly moved back since then. Continue reading →

Remember the young people who supposedly loved cities and rejected the suburbs? It turns out they are the ones who have been fleeing the cities since the beginning of the pandemic. According to a recent analysis of census data, while the number of people in large cities declined by 0.9 percent since the pandemic began, the number of children under 5 — an indicator of young families — fell by more than 6 percent.

Americans have long preferred to raise children in the suburbs, and Gen Z turns out to be no exception. Photo by Cade Martin.

The notion that families with children prefer suburbs to inner cities will be a surprise only to urban planners who insisted that the suburbs are passé and that no one wanted to live in them anymore. Yet this narrative had become an established part of media reports about census data for the past couple of decades. Continue reading →

As if the 15-minute city wasn’t bad enough, planners are now promoting what they call the 20-minute suburb. According to its supporters, suburbanites are fed up with driving everywhere and are demanding that the suburbs be rebuilt at higher densities with lots of “town centers” so that everyone can walk to a shop in 20 minutes.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill concept for denser, 20-minute suburbs with lots of transit.

How do planners know this? Because during the height of the pandemic, a lot of people bought bicycles causing, for a brief time, a bicycle shortage. Based on this and similar anecdotal information, planners agree that the time is ripe to completely rebuilt the nation’s suburbs by eliminating single-family zoning and building lots of dense mixed-use developments. Continue reading →

The Niskanen Center is supposed to be a free-market group. It is named after Bill Niskanen, who was Ronald Reagan’s chief economic advisor until he got fired because he was too free-market oriented for Reagan. His research on how bureaucracies work influenced me when I was working on Forest Service planning in the 1980s, long before I met him in person. After I went to work at Cato (where he was chairman of the board), I learned his father had run Pacific Trailways out of Bend Oregon, and I enjoyed visiting with him about the history of transportation.

Click image to download a 4.2-MB PDF of this 22-page report.

After Niskanen passed away in 2011, Cato Institute senior fellow Jerry Taylor, who I remember as being so laser focused on free markets that we had many arguments over the whether it was better to be a pure libertarian vs. a pragmatic one, started the Niskanen Center to bring market tools to environmental issues. Continue reading →