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Category Archives: Regional planning

The Antiplanner’s Library: Spreading the Wealth

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
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Subtitled “How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities,” this book sounds like it is right up the Antiplanner’s street (since my home fortunately doesn’t have an alley). Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues that Obama intends to forcefully implement the smart-growth agenda in his second term, taking away people’s property rights; redistributing income; and forcing people to live in mixed-income communities.

Despite having less than 200 pages of text, the book is documented with nearly 500 endnotes. I agree with many of the arguments Kurtz makes. Yet I find myself repelled by the odor of paranoia that pervades the book. While the author documents particular reports and proposals from various planners and liberal activists, he fails to show that the ideas of people like Myron Orfield or David Rusk are central to Obama’s thinking. Instead, he relies on ad hominem attacks and guilt-by-association.

Central to the book is a group called Building One America, whose web site declares itself to favor “inclusion, sustainability, and economic growth,” and brags that it was recently “at the White House.” According to Kurtz, this group’s goals are to put urban-growth boundaries around every metropolitan area; force economic integration, that is, force all neighborhoods to accept residents of all income levels; and redistribute income from high-income neighborhoods and cities to low-income ones in the same region (p. 7).

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Planning Is Destroying Britain

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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The Economist reviews housing prices in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and what do you know, it finds that high housing prices are due to urban planning. “The biggest constraint on development in London is the Green Belt,” says the magazine that calls itself a newspaper. “Tt runs (with perforations) all around London, to a depth of up to 50 miles, and bans almost all building on half a million hectares of land around the city.”

Ah, but Britain has 62 million people in an area slightly smaller than the state of Oregon (94,000 vs. 98,000 square miles), so those greenbelts are needed to preserve farms, forests, and open space, right? Not really.

As a BBC writer points out, urban areas cover just 6.8 percent of the United Kingdom (10.6 percent of England, 1.3 percent of Scotland, 3.6 percent of Northern Ireland, and 4.1 percent of Wales). Moreover, much of the land inside those urban areas is open space, so less than 2.3 percent of England, and even smaller proportions of the rest of the kingdom, have been “paved over.”

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Does Transit Promote Urban Development?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Back in 1995, the FTA asked transit advocates Robert Cervero (of the UC Berkeley planning school) and Samuel Seskins (of Parsons Brinckerhoff) whether transit let to changes in urban form. After reviewing the literature, they concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely “create” new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment” (page 3). They added that this “redistribution” mainly favored central city downtowns at the expense of the suburbs.

I’ve been citing that study as definitive for many years, but recently someone asked me if there is anything more recent. As a matter of fact, there is.

In 2010, Brookings published Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (volume 3), which included a paper by USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliano and one of her colleagues that addressed the same question. Based on “more than three decades of research,” they “found little evidence that transit investment has had significant impacts on urban structure.”

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Innovative (Meaning Insane) Land-Use Policy

By | | Regional planning
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The Belgian Port of Antwerp needed to expand. But Belgium has a policy that any greenfield development must be offset by set-asides of already developed land. So the residents of an entire town were forcibly evicted and their town declared a “new nature preserve.”

The buildings in the town were not leveled, and instead planners are allowing them to decay through “natural reclamation.” This has led to a lot of graffiti, which happens to be the subject of the news article that is linked to above.

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Portland in particular loves to brag that it is a European city, so don’t be surprised if the Keep-Portland-Weird crowd are the first in America to come up with a zero-net-development policy.

Declares or Declared?

By | | Regional planning
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“California Declares War on the Suburbs,” reports Wendell Cox’s op ed in the Wall Street Journal (or at least the headline so reports). This has led to all sort of supporting commentary in the conservative blogosphere, along with articles from the left that claims Cox is full of it.

All the Antiplanner wants to know is why anyone thinks this war on the suburbs is anything new? Cox’s article referred to a proposal “to require more than one-half of the new housing in Los Angeles County and five other Southern California counties to be concentrated in dense, so-called transit villages.” But this is really nothing new.

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Wishful Thinking

By | | Regional planning
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Have American cities stopped growing at the urban fringe? Some people think so based on a trend of one or two years during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Antiplanner’s loyal ally, Wendell Cox, doesn’t think so.

Are Americans shifting in droves from from cars to public transit? Based on similar short-term evidence, Colorado PIRG and US PIRG think so. The Antiplanner thinks this is just wishful thinking on the part of those who don’t like suburbs or automobiles.

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The Seductive Appeal of Value-Capture Finance

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
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Today, the Antiplanner is in North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a light-rail line that will cost $33 per trip and a commuter-rail line that will cost $92 per trip.

The Antiplanner, however, is in Charlotte looking at a proposed commuter-rail line that is expected to cost more than $450 million to start up and is projected to carry only about 5,600 trips (meaning 2,800 round trips) a day in 2025. The Antiplanner calculates that, for about the same price as the rail line, taxpayers could give every one of the 2,800 riders a brand-new Toyota Prius every other year for the life of the rail project.

This rail line is such a dog that not even the Federal Transit Administration will help pay for it. So the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) is proposing that local cities and counties cover half the costs, while the other half would be shared by CATS and the state of North Carolina. Under a proposed financial plan, five cities and two counties are to use “value capture” to raise their half of the money.

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One Down, 48 to Go

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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“Building better communities” was the slogan of the California Redevelopment Association. But the critics charged that redevelopment agencies “deprived tens of thousands of working and lower-income residents of their homes and livelihoods while granting vast subsidies to billionaires.” In the end, the social justice questions didn’t matter, but the subsidies did, so to save the state billions of dollars a year, California redevelopment agencies shut down for good last week.

The agencies had $30 billion worth of outstanding debts to private parties which will still be repaid out of tax-increment finance (TIF) revenues. But these repayments will only use about half of the $5.7 billion in TIF revenues the agencies collected each year, so now the other half will be returned to schools and other entities that rely on property taxes. Since the state has to make up the difference when schools lost money to TIF, the state ends up saving billions of dollars a year. As the debts are paid off, the state will save even more money.

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Urban Renewal Dead in California

By | | Regional planning
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California cities do not have a constitutionally given right to steal money from schools and other tax districts to use for their crony capitalism and social engineering, says the California Supreme Court when it rejected a law suit brought by urban redevelopment agencies against a state law abolishing them. As a result, barring new legislation reinstating the practice, tax-increment financing (TIF) comes to an end in California, the state that pioneered the tax tool and, as recently as 2011, did more TIF than all the other states put together.

It is conceivable that, somewhere, sometime, a TIF project was truly worthwhile. In general, however, TIF was mainly a way for cities to build empires, elected officials to engage in crony capitalism, and urban planners to practice social engineering. Almost all of those “transit-oriented developments” that were supposedly stimulated by light rail and streetcars were really simulated by TIF. Nearly all of the cases of cities using eminent domain to take private property and give it to developers involved TIF.

Jerry Brown and Democrats in the California legislature killed TIF to free up tax dollars that should have been going for schools and other programs, not to protect property rights. But the fact that the Democrats saw through the claims that TIF is “free money” should inspire TIF critics elsewhere. In particular, in places where state money is used to help pay for schools, tax guardians can argue that abolishing TIF will help reduce that burden. Continue reading →

Heroes or Heels?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Last week, the Atlantic web site published an article about the brave Tea Party activists who are challenging the evil urban planners who are interfering with property rights and attempting to socially engineer American cities. Except, the article’s writer, Anthony Flint, seemed to think that was a bad thing.

Some idea of Flint can be gained from his claim that the Heritage Foundation recent published “a grave warning against ‘radical environmentalists,’ driven by, yes, the UN’s Agenda 21.” In fact, as the Antiplanner reported last week, the article in question said exactly the opposite: that Agenda 21 has little or nothing to do with the smart-growth plans being written by urban planners across the country. Apparently, Flint would not pass a high school reading comprehension test.

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