Growth Management Is an Elite Good

Thomas Ragonetti has practiced land-use law for more than three decades and taught land-use planning at the University of Denver since 1993. This has led him to the same conclusion as the Antiplanner: “Growth management is inherently an elite or luxury good.”

“The wealthy will always win a bidding war for the most desirable dwellings while the poorer classes end up being squeezed,” Denver Post writer Vincent Carroll explains. “The more extreme the growth management, the farther it will slice up the income scale.”
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So Colorado has Boulder, one of the nation’s earliest practitioners of growth management, whose housing is more expensive (relative to incomes) than 90 percent of the rest of the country. Most of the 10 percent that is more expensive is in California, most of whose coastal cities having practiced growth management almost as long as (or longer than) Boulder. Of course, the people in these cities mostly regard themselves as “progressive,” meaning they care about poor people — they just want them to live somewhere else.

Barriers to Entry

During a recent meeting, the Antiplanner was extolling the virtues of Houston‘s land-use policies, and a home builder at the meeting said, “Of course, no one here wants our city to be like Houston,” meaning no one wanted Houston’s land-use regime.

Why not? I asked. “There is too much competition down there. My company can’t make a profit,” he said. “You have to have some barriers to entry to be able to make money.”

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How to Spend $100 Million Doing Nothing

The bureaucrats planning a new bridge across the Columbia River between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington have so far spent $65 million — and by this time next year, they will be up to $100 million — all without accomplishing a thing.

That could have been enough money to replace the Sellwood Bridge, which is in much worse shape, both functionally and structurally — than the Columbia River bridge, but which planners say they don’t have any money for. Maybe that’s because they are spending all their money on planning.

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Beware Megaregional Government

Urban planners are eagerly anticipating the next step in their efforts to take control over the lives of unsuspecting Americans: megaregional planning. Last September, the Department of Transportation published a report on “the implications” of megaregions “for infrastructure and transportation planning.” Now there is a group calling itself America 2050 that thinks we need a “third century vision” for the eleven megaregions it claims are emerging across the nation.

From the America 2050 web site. Click for a larger view.

Jane Jacobs once defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” The Antiplanner would go further and say that, now that urban planners have totally screwed up many metropolitan regions, they want the power to screw up even larger areas of land — in the guise, of course, of fixing the problems that the won’t admit they created at the metropolitan level.
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Zero-Down-Payment Loans & the Housing Crisis

Despite all the hoopla over subprime loans and unscrupulous lenders exploiting low-income homebuyers, a new analysis by University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz finds that subprime was not all that important in the housing crisis. Most mortgage foreclosures involved prime loans, not subprimes or loans with introductory “teaser” interest rates that soon reset upward.

Instead, the majority of foreclosures involve prime borrowers who bought houses, often with little or no down payments, thinking they would appreciate. When housing prices declined instead to the point where they were “under water” — i.e., the loans were greater than the value of the homes — many people simply walked away and let the banks foreclose.

In a housing market unfettered by government regulation, home prices rise and fall with local incomes. Unless a major industry shuts down (think oil in Houston in the 1980s, Boeing in Seattle in the 1970s, the auto industry in Michigan today), home price declines tend to be small. To guard against people leaving homes, lenders traditionally require 10 to 20 percent down payments. This insures that the equity people have in their homes will almost always be greater than the remaining mortgage.

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Planned Waste in the Puget Sound

The Puget Sound Regional Council (the metropolitan planning organization for the Seattle-Tacoma area) is seeking comments on its draft 2040 transportation plan. The Antiplanner has long been critical of long-range transportation planning, and this plan is, if anything, even more repulsive than previous efforts.

For one thing, even though it is supposed to be a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS), it is written in a patronizing question-and-answer style reminiscent of a children’s book. This sends a clear message that planners think the readers are idiots and need to be guided by the hand or they might want something that is politically incorrect. As it turns out, the data in the document show it is the planners who are the idiots.

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Sanity Prevails in Texas

After The Onion reported that Texas was building a wall around itself to keep out the job-hungry Americans, the Texas legislature effectively did the same thing by passing a smart-growth bill designed to destroy the Texas economy so that it would no longer have jobs attracting people from the rest of the country. Fortunately, Governor Rick Perry vetoed the bill.

The bill “would promote a one-size-fits-all approach to land use and planning that would not work across a state as large and diverse as Texas,” said Perry. “Local governments can already adopt ‘smart growth’ policies based on the desires of the community without a state-led effort that endorses such planning.”
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Actually, what makes Texas work so well is that counties, for the most part, have no zoning authority. This means if some city such as Austin decides to adopt a smart-growth plan, developers can simply go outside the city limits and build for the market instead of what planners want.

In Defense of Paul Krugman

As an unabashed supporter of Democratic Party policies, Paul Krugman has made some enemies in conservative camps. So the right-wing blogosphere was gleeful to discover a 2002 column in which Krugman actually urged the Federal Reserve Bank to “create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” As near as I can tell, the first to point this out was someone named Patrick who commented on a Reason blog.

Since then, Mark Thornton at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute has uncovered many other examples of Krugman saying things in 2001-2004 that promoted a Fed-led housing boom. “Krugman did cause the housing bubble,” Thornton concludes.

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Urban Sprawl Is for the Birds

University of Washington Professor John Marzluff is an expert on crows and ravens, among other birds. Recently, he began looking at the effects of urban sprawl on bird populations.

He was surprised to find that the effects were positive. Breaking up farms or woodlands into lots, each of whose owners manage their land a slightly different way, significantly increased biodiversity for songbirds.

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Houston Densifying Faster Than Portland

The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, presents these data (20 KB PDF) on changes in urban density between 2000 and 2007. The density of the Portland urban area grew by 12.4 percent. Meanwhile, the density of the Houston urban area grew by 14.3 percent.

Other relatively unplanned urban areas also had rapid density growth: Riverside-San Bernardino (the least-planned communities in southern California) by 19.5 percent; Atlanta by 17.7 percent; Austin by 16.6 percent; and Las Vegas by 15.6 percent.

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Cox cautions that “These data relate to the urban footprints (land areas) as determined by the US Bureau of the Census in 2000. No adjustment has been made for geographical expansion of urban areas since that time. Thus, the 2007 density figures do not indicate urban area densities in 2007, but rather the density of the 2000 boundaries in 2007.”