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Category Archives: Regional planning

Mixed Messages from Fortune Magazine

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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On March 29, Colin Barr, a Fortune magazine financial writer, argues in a blog post that “housing prices will keep falling.” Just two weeks later, the cover story of the April 11 Fortune proclaims the “return of real estate” and says “it’s time to buy again.”

They can’t both be right: either Fortune magazine is wrong or Fortune magazine is wrong. As a matter of fact, they are both wrong.

Barr bases his argument on a graph comparing housing prices with the consumer price index. Before 1997, the two lines parallel one another. Then housing shoots upward until 2006. Though housing prices have fallen since then, they haven’t reached the line that would have been parallel to the CPI. Prices will continue falling, Barr argues, until they return to that line.

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Mesa Del Dolares

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning
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Saturday, the Antiplanner spoke in Damascus, Oregon, a rural community on the fringe of the Portland area that Metro planners have targeted to become a dense, New Urban city of 100,000. The residents of the area are none too happy about that and have been fighting it by passing initiatives preventing the city from cooperating with Metro.

Meanwhile, I’ve been intrigued with a similar situation in New Mexico: Mesa Del Sol. This is 12,900 acres of formerly state-owned land adjacent to (and recently annexed into) Albuquerque. The state and city hired Peter Calthorpe to plan a New Urban community, and then picked Forest City, a national developer that specializes in mixed-use projects, to develop the area. Fortunately for Forest City, the area had no previous residents to protest the development.

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Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

By | | Regional planning
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Later this week, the Antiplanner will review The Triumph of the City, a new book by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. But because a crucial part of that book is based on a working paper written by Glaeser and UCLA economist Matthew Kahn, I first want to review that paper.

Titled “The Greenness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development,” the paper attempts to estimate household CO2 emissions from 66 major urban areas. The paper concludes that some urban areas produce substantially less emissions per household and also that suburban emissions are larger than central city emissions, especially in the case of older cities such as New York.

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Housing and Economic Growth

By | | Regional planning
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Nations with well-functioning housing markets that are responsive to changes in demand will be more likely to grow faster than nations with strict land-use regulation, says a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The report is a part of a series of studies known as Going for Growth that are promoting economic development.

The report (which is also summarized in this presentation) compared housing markets in more than 20 leading nations and showed that those with less regulation tended to have more affordable housing whose prices were less volatile. Some of the data in the report, however, were overly simplistic: the United States and Canada, for example, were each considered as single housing markets, when in fact housing policies and market conditions vary tremendously from state to state, province to province, and metro area to metro area.

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Small May Be Beautiful, but Coercion Is Not

By | | Regional planning
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A new report from Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality urges the state to give people incentives to live in smaller homes or disincentives to live in larger ones. A Life Cycle Approach to Prioritizing Methods of Preventing Waste from the Residential Construction Sector reviews the energy costs of various styles of homes and comes to the startling conclusion that larger homes require more energy than smaller ones. (How much did it cost to figure that one out?)

The report therefore recommends that the state “place incentives on smaller homes or disincentives on larger homes.” Why? If someone needs a bigger home, and they are willing to pay for it, why should the state care? Despite the coy use of the term “incentives,” what they really mean is coercive measures to arbitrarily make larger homes more expensive to force more people to live in smaller houses.

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Interpreting the Election Results

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation
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Tea party supporters do not agree on a lot of issues, but are firm on two things: cutting government spending and protecting property rights. What do the election results mean for the future of land-use and transportation planning?

On one hand, many of the results look promising for supporters of property rights and efficient (user-fee-driven) transportation policies.

  • Wisconsin rail skeptic Scott Walker, who promised to cancel the state’s moderate-speed rail project, soundly trounced the pro-rail incumbent governor.
  • Ohio elected fiscal conservative John Kasich, who is also a rail skeptic, as governor, probably dooming that state’s moderate-speed rail plans.
  • Florida appears to have elected fiscal conservative Rick Scott as governor. He will probably take a hard look at that state’s high-speed rail programs.
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How Many Subsidies Can Dance on the Head of a TOD?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Rail transit advocates often claim that new rail lines increase the value of properties near rail stations. While the Antiplanner is skeptical of many of these claims, a new report casts a dark light on such increased property values.

According to this report from the Dukakis Center for Urban Policy (yes, that Dukakis), increased property values push out low-income families that tend to be transit dependent and replace them with higher-income households who tend to own cars. This “undesirable neighborhood change,” the report argues, “is substantial enough that it needs to be managed whenever transit investments or improvements are being planned.”

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Protests in Stuttgart

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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From 5,000 miles away, it is difficult to tell what is going on in Stuttgart, Germany, where tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest against a $6 billion plan to replace the city’s World War I-vintage train station. Is the main concern the cost? The loss of a historic structure? Or the city’s plan to locate a “true pedestrian haven” on the site of tracks that will be moved underground?

It is probably all of these. One anonymous protester calls the project “a grave for taxes,” and many argue that the money would be better spent on other activities. It was originally supposed to cost about $3 billion, but the price tag is now double that, and this doesn’t even count another $3 billion for a new “high-speed” rail line to the airport.

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Urban Planning Dream or Nightmare?

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
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In Best-Laid Plans, the Antiplanner argues that cities are too complicated to plan, so anyone who tries to plan them ends up following fads and focusing on one or two goals to the near-exclusion of all else. The current fad is to reduce per capita driving by increasing density and spending money on rail transit.

The logical end product of such narrow-minded planning is illustrated by a SimCity constructed by Vincent Ocasla, an architecture student from the Philippines. His goal was to build the densest possible SimCity, and the result is a landscape that is almost entirely covered by high-rise towers used for both residences and work. There are no streets and residents travel either on foot or by subway. There is little need for travel, however, as most residents live in the same tower in which they work.

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The Case Against Time Magazine

By | | Regional planning
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Time used to be a news magazine with (for part of its history) a strong anti-communist slant. Apparently, news doesn’t sell anymore in the Internet age, as Time is now more of an opinion magazine.

So when last week’s cover story was titled, “Rethinking Homeownership,” the Antiplanner assumed this would be another smart-growth diatribe against urban sprawl with the usual talk about how “some people just shouldn’t own a home.” There’s a little bit of that: “Homeownership contributed to the hollowing out of cities and . . . fed America’s overuse of energy and oil.” But mostly it is just a lament that there have recently been lots of foreclosures.

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