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Category Archives: Regional planning

Saving High Street

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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It’s not enough for planners to control where people live. Now they want to control where people shop. British planner Mary Portas has unveiled a 28-point plan for saving High Street (the Britishism for what Americans would call downtown). The most important part of the plan would prevent anyone from building a suburban shopping center without approval from the national government.

Instead of new suburban shops, Portas wants to require that everything from supermarkets to car boot sales (similar to what Americans would call flea markets) be located in town centres, er, centers.

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A Recipe for Decline

By | | Regional planning
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Thanks to high housing prices and a poor economy (which is also partly due to high housing prices), more Americans are leaving California than are moving to the state. In the last decade, 1.5 million more people moved out than moved in from other states, and the poor economy is also reducing foreign immigration, leaving the state’s future in doubt. For the first time in more than a century, a majority of the state’s population was actually born in California.

Back in the 1970s, when California cities were adopting anti-growth policies, it was all the rage for people to talk about a “steady-state” economy rather than a growth economy. But, says historian Mike Davis, “A steady-state California is both a contradiction in terms and a recipe for decline.”

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California Governor Jerry Brown persuaded the state legislature to eliminate local redevelopment agencies, and now the state is trying to seize $1.7 billion in assets held by those agencies. If the state is willing to take such drastic action to save itself, maybe it will also be willing to revoke some of the insane land-use laws that are the underlying cause of its economic doldrums.

New Concept: Compare Benefits with Costs

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is considering the possibility of using benefit-cost analyses to decide how to spend federal and state taxpayer dollars. This “new” technology dates back to 1848, so you can see why regional planners might be just discovering it now.

As presented in the San Jose Mercury-News, benefit-cost analysis sounds very objective and scientific. The problem, however, is that most of the “benefits” in the analysis, including such things as “Road fatalities and injuries, emissions reductions, the cost of owning and operating a car and even the health effects of physical inactivity,” are almost completely speculative. How do you put a price on those things? How do you measure the effect of building a BART line vs. building a HOT lane on physical inactivity? The answers to these questions will be as political as any other decision, meaning the benefit-cost analysis will be just as politicized as whatever previously passed for analysis at the MTC.

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Meeting with a Regional Planner

By | | Regional planning
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An Aussie who calls himself the Unconventional Economist, also known as Leith van Onselen, created and posted this little cartoon about dealing with regional planners. He based much of it on a script by another blogger named Ross Elliot.

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The Unconventional Economist, by the way, has written an impressive series of articles on housing bubbles and policies in various countries, including Canada, China, Germany (one country that didn’t have a bubble), the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. He has also written about U.S. housing markets, including California, Phoenix, and Texas, and of course plenty of posts about Australia. The Antiplanner agrees with almost everything he says, which means many readers of this blog will not.

Inside the Consulting World

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Last Saturday the Antiplanner participated in a conference about the Columbia River Crossing, a government-planning effort aimed at replacing a bridge that doesn’t need to be replaced so Portland can sneak its light-rail system (and associated land-use planning) into Vancouver, Washington. One of the more fascinating presentations at the conference came from Tiffany Couch, a forensic accountant who has been studying the budget of the planning team called the Columbia River Crossing.

It is public knowledge that this team has already spent $130 million doing nothing but pushing paper around. Since the bridge itself could be built for less than a billion dollars, that’s a healthy share of the cost. Of course, the planners’ goal is to spend well over $3 billion on the bridge, which would include money for light rail and other bells and whistles that are probably just as unnecessary.

What the public didn’t know, until Ms. Couch’s presentation (4 MB PPTX file), was that almost all of this $130 million was paid to one consulting firm. In 2005, Couch revealed, ODOT and WSDOT issued a “notice to consultants” that they wanted to hire someone to write the environmental impact statement for the project (page 17 of Couch’s presentation). “The project team anticipates the total cost of the environmental phase to be in excess of $20 million.” It asked consultants to submit and proposal with a list of their qualifications.

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Remembering Jane Jacobs

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning
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An article in The American Conservative commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The publication also asked the Antiplanner to join a number of New Urbanists and others in an on-line seminar about the influence of Jacobs on American cities.

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At least six of the other eight participants in the webinar are hardcore new urbanists, so naturally they disagree. In my opinion, the best review of The Death & Life was by an amazing sociologist named Herbert Gans, and it is available on the web to subscribers of Commentary magazine. If you are a subscriber, I heartily recommend the review.

The Density Fallacy

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
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A decade or so ago, an Economist senior editor named Frances Cairncross wrote a book called The Death of Distance which argued that, thanks to declining transportation and telecommunications costs, distance really doesn’t matter anymore. So it is ironic that another Economist writer, Ryan Avent, has written a new book arguing that “Distance is not dead” and proximity to other people still matters.

The Antiplanner previously mentioned this book, The Gated City (available only from Amazon in Kindle format for $1.99), a couple of weeks ago, but now I’ve finished reading it and can write a more detailed review.

Ryan’s book makes the following argument:

1. Denser cities are more productive
2. Due to NIMBYs, denser cities also have higher housing costs
3. Get rid of the NIMBYs, and cities will become even denser and more productive

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Here We Go Again

By | | Regional planning
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Density is good. That’s the message from Ryan Avent, a writer for The Economist, whose new ebook, The Gated City, received a boost from a promotional op ed in the New York Times.

Density, according to Avent, makes people wealthier, happier, and more productive. The data he uses to support these ideas, however, are suspect. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to grasp the distinction between metropolitan area and urbanized area. He understands that metropolitan area is the wrong measure of an urban area’s density, so he uses a weighted-average density of census tracts in a metropolitan area. A metropolitan area such as San Jose, whose urban area density is the third-densest in the nation, ends up appearing less dense than New York, whose urban area is considerably less dense but which has a high density core.

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Omaha’s Unlivable Plan

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
24 Comments

Three years ago, the Antiplanner reviewed the regional transportation plans for the nation’s 70 largest metropolitan areas and found that 40 of them had some form of “smart-growth,” anti-auto policies built in. One that did not was for Omaha.

Omaha planners are eager to rectify that situation. Perhaps in response to Ray LaHood’s direction that all metro areas incorporate “livability” into their next round of long-range plans (which are revised every five years), Omaha’s new plan, which is now being prepared, has an unhealthy dose of this inane idea.

So far, the planners are merely at the PowerPoint stage. The most offensive part of their presentation is page two of this show, which says they want to “manage congestion.”

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Suburbs Are Still Growing

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
61 Comments

Next time someone tells you about how everyone is returning to the cities, point them to these maps based on the 2010 census. Available for the forty largest urban areas in the United States, they show, almost without exception, the central cities losing population and the suburbs gaining.

According to the mapmakers, “deep blue indicates that the population doubled (or more), pure red means that everyone left, grey denotes no change, and the intermediate tones represent the spectrum of increases and decreases in-between.” The white beyond the urban periphery indicates very low densities.

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