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Category Archives: Regional planning

The Suburbs Are Still Alive

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Ho-hum, another prediction that “suburbs are dead,” this time from Fortune magazine assistant editor Leigh Gallagher. Her just-released book, The End of the Suburbs, argues that Americans no longer dream of owning a house with a yard and driving to work and everywhere else.

“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”

As it turns out, however, all the studies don’t show that. Take, for example, the Census Bureau report (previously noted here) that new homes are larger than ever or this survey, which found that three out four millennials aspire to live in a house of their own–and many of them are working hard to achieve that.

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Another New Urban Failure

By | | Regional planning
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“Three years after its completion, most of the storefronts remain vacant” in a mixed-use development next to a BART station in Pleasant Hill, California, reports the Contra Costa Times. “Projects that combine housing with retail space are a poor fit for the suburbs,” the paper reports one expert as saying.

Mixed-use developments are the gold ring on the land development merry-go-round for urban planners, most of whom don’t really understand land development. They think that mixed-use developments will lead people to walk more and drive less and therefore try to force them onto neighborhoods, particularly near rail transit stations, using prescriptive zoning.

In the Pleasant Hill case, the developer was probably required to build 34,000 square feet of commercial space in order to get a permit to build 422 luxury apartments. But a few hundred two-person families is not enough to support that much retail space, and people who enter and exit the nearby BART station are too intent on getting to work or home to stop and shop. According to commercial real estate broker John Cumbelich, the Pleasant Hill development could support, at most, about 5,000 square feet of commercial space.

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Is Economic Immobility Due to Sprawl?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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For the second time in a week, Paul Krugman has written about sprawl. This time he is as wrong as the last, when he blamed Detroit’s bankruptcy on sprawl. Now he blames Atlanta’s entrenched poverty on urban sprawl. “The city may just be too spread out,” he says, “so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Krugman quotes a study that finds that one of many factors reducing social mobility include “areas in which low income individuals were residentially segregated from middle income individuals.” But income segregation is very different from sprawl, and can take place in communities of any density. New York City, for example, has pretty high economic segregation.

Krugman adds that Atlanta’s sprawl “would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t.” He obviously doesn’t know the history of mass transit in Atlanta, which had a great transit system until regional leaders decided to build an expensive rail transit system. Since they aimed the rail lines at middle-class neighborhoods and sacrificed bus service to low-income neighborhoods to pay for the rail lines, transit’s share of commuting has fallen by more than 60 percent and per capita transit ridership has fallen by more than two thirds.

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Bankruptcy and Sprawl

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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More than twenty years ago, Joel Garreau observed that every American central city except Detroit had undergone a renaissance. Detroit’s problem then, and now, seem to be poor governance, something that can’t be fixed by federal subsidies.

Yet someone was bound to blame Detroit’s bankruptcy on urban sprawl, a benign settlement pattern that seems to get blamed for just about everything bad that happens. Surprisingly, perhaps, in this case the blame is cast by Paul Krugman, who claims that “job sprawl” doomed Detroit.

Krugman compares Detroit with Pittsburgh, noting that the latter has experienced a revival since 2005, while Detroit continued to spiral downward. The reason, says Krugman, is that “less than a quarter of Detroit jobs are within 10 miles of the traditional central business district, versus more than half in Pittsburgh.”

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High Housing Costs Not Offset by Low Transport Costs

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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Growth-management planners who have made housing unaffordable in California, Oregon, and other states respond that this high cost is offset by lower transportation costs in their cities. They call it the H+T Affordability Index, and the supposed reduced cost of transportation excuses all of the housing affordability problems their plans create.

In fact, most of their cost numbers are hypothetical, and their estimates seem likely manipulated to achieve the result they wanted. Fortunately, we now have a relatively independent source of information that directly contradicts the H+T claim.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a left-wing organization that seems to believe in income redistribution. However, it has no axe to grind about urban sprawl, so when it calculates the cost of living in various cities, it has no incentive to skew the data in favor of heavily planned regions.

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Repeat After Me: Cost-Effectiveness

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
27 Comments

Someone named Willis Eschenbach has a blog post arguing that a carbon tax is “crazy” because it will have a negligible effect on how much Americans drive. He observes that the carbon taxes he’s “seen discussed are on the order of $20-$30 per ton” of CO2, and calculates that a tax of $28 per ton equals about 25 cents per gallon of gasoline.

He further calculates that increasing the cost of gasoline by 25 cents reduces per capita driving by about 100 miles per year. Since Americans drive an average of about 10,000 miles per year, this is only 1 percent. “They want to impoverish the poor for that?” he asks.

There are several errors in his analysis, but when I tried to point them out in comments I got lost in an effort to enter a valid on-line name and password. So I’ll just discuss them here. First, let me say that I’m not convinced that anthropogenic climate change is serious enough to warrant huge changes in our society. But if I were, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be the most sensible change.

Eschenbach’s most important error is his implicit assumption that the best way to measure the effects of a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions is by the number of miles of per capita driving. In fact, I’ve argued for years that reducing per capita driving is not a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and Eschenbach’s analysis reinforces that: large reductions in driving would require much higher taxes than most analysts believe are necessary to reduce emissions.

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The Non-Devastating Impact of Urban Sprawl

By | | Regional planning
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Atlantic Cities has some satellite photos that supposedly show the “devastating impact of urban sprawl.” But it is easy to exaggerate the supposed “impact” of sprawl.

First, pick a fast-growing region like Atlanta or Dallas. Second, pick an aerial photo of the region as it exists today. Third, overlay photos of the same land area in the past. Fourth, make sure your audience knows that development is bad so that the expansion of development to cover your entire map makes it appear there is no undeveloped land left in the universe.

When examined from a broader view–such as the entire United States–urban sprawl has almost no impact at all. The U.S. has a land area of just over 3.5 million square miles. The 2010 census found that all urbanized areas of 50,000 people or more cover less than 87,000 square miles, or less than 2.5 percent of the total. This is up from 2.0 percent in 2000, and 73 percent of that change is due to population growth in the urbanized areas including the addition of 45 areas that had less than 50,000 people in 2000.

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A Look Back at Oregon’s Senate Bill 100

By | | Regional planning
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Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the passage of Oregon’s “landmark” land-use law, known as Senate Bill 100, a columnist with the Salem Statesman-Journal looks back at the history of the passage and early implementation of that law. If he had looked a little closer at the long-term effects, rather than just the back-room dealing, he would have found an unhappier story.

First, the law made housing in Oregon unaffordable. Before the law was passed, median home prices were consistently about two times median family incomes. As Oregon cities began drawing urban-growth boundaries, prices quickly shot up to three time incomes and today stand at four times incomes. While developers in most other states were able to buy large parcels of land and design beautiful and affordable master-planned communities, such developments were rendered illegal in Oregon since no large parcels were available inside of urban-growth boundaries. Land-use regulation also made home prices more volatile, leading to a huge drop in prices in the 1980s and another big drop after 2008.

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Comments on Tyranny Bay Area

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
11 Comments

“Implementation of Plan Bay Area will require the demolition of more than 169,000 single-family detached homes, or one out of every nine such homes in the region, according to table 2.3-2 of the draft environmental impact report. Any earthquake or other natural event that resulted in this much destruction would be counted as the greatest natural catastrophe in American history.”

The Antiplanner would like to think this is one of the better opening paragraphs that I have written in some time. My complete comments on Plan Bay Area are now available for download.

In reviewing my previous post on this subject, my friend MSetty made the good point that Plan Bay Area planners put that 169,000 home figure in terms of a change in demand. Although 56 percent of Bay Area households live in single-family detached homes today, by 2040 only 39 percent will want to, so say the planners.

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