Category Archives: Regional planning

Mild-mannered Republican Ray LaHood has been transformed into the Secretary of Behavioral Modification. As Will notes, the behavioralists don’t know their history and fail to recognize that behavioral tools are costly and produce little benefit. Moreover, once they get started, there is no These blogs involve the popular blogs like the road rash blog, the cialis viagra levitra fit city blog, the luxury life blogs and several other blogs. The side effects of this faulty habit are disastrous and, may ruin the entire life of viagra generic discount the suffering person. Experiencing order cheap levitra http://secretworldchronicle.com/2019/09/ep-9-39-interlude-giants-in-the-ocean/ diarrhea after having a gallbladder removed is not a reasonable statement. Since the mobility of the levitra prescription blood vessels get clogged, men are ought to lose their erection of the male partner. end to the amount of meddling they are willing to do in people’s lives.

Portland Congressman Earl Blumenauer has offered to defend the behavioralists in a debate with Will. The Antiplanner would be willing to make a rare return to Portland to see that.

Land-use regulation caused the housing bubble. Now, in at least one city, other regulations have forced a bank to demolish brand-new homes.

It would be easy to say that this shows that builder constructed a surplus of homes. But the truth is that these houses, like their builder and our entire economy, are simply victims of overzealous regulation.

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Among the many rules in the city of Victorville is one that imposes daily fines on the owners of homes not brought up to code within so many months after construction begins. The builder of these homes nearly completed them, then went bankrupt. Given a choice between paying the fines, bringing the homes up to code, or tearing them down, the bank decided to bulldoze them.

According to one of the comments on this site, the “code violation” was some windows broken by local vandals. Another story says it was due to the builder’s failure “to finish roads, walls, and other improvements that bring the community into code.” Whatever the details, this waste — from beginning to end — can be blamed solely on stupid land-use rules.

Ron Utt, the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, has uncovered the first steps of President Obama’s plan to force smart growth on those parts of the country that managed to escape the housing bubble. The departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development have signed a joint agreement to impose smart growth on the entire nation.

Under the agreement, the departments will “have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years.” Of course, nearly all of the metropolitan areas that already did such integrated planning suffered housing bubbles, while most of those that did not did not have bubbles. The effect of Obama’s plan will be to make the next housing bubble much worse than the one that caused the current financial crisis.

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“The American suburb as we know it is dying,” says Time magazine. They are going to turn into the next slums, says the Atlantic Monthly. Both articles cite research by a planning professor named Arthur Nelson, who claims that by 2025 the U.S. will have 22 million “surplus” homes on large (over 1/6th acre) lots.

Nelson supposedly calculates this in a 2006 paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). Table 4 in the paper says that 38 percent of Americans prefer multi-family housing, 37 percent prefer homes on small (less than one-sixth acre) lots, and only 25 percent prefer homes on large lots. A note to the table says it “is based on interpretations of surveys by Myers and Gearin (2001).”

Those turn out to be rather loose interpretations. The Myers and Gearin paper includes the following quotes and summaries of public surveys:

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Gordon Brown, the U.K. prime minister, is preparing to order local governments to expand the amount of land available for development so as to alleviate that nation’s high housing prices. Although the media presents this as a conflict between “the environment” and affordable housing, it is in fact a conflict between an elite’s desire to preserve rural open space vs. a working-class desire for decent housing.

Wendell Cox’s survey of housing prices found that the U.K. had some of the least-affordable housing in the English-speaking world. Unlike Canada and the U.S., which both have some unaffordable areas and others that are affordable, virtually all of the U.K. is unaffordable.

Urban-growth boundaries can trace their origin to Queen Elizabeth I, who in 1580 ordered her people to “desist and forbear” any new construction within three miles of the gates of London. The U.K.’s Town & Country Planning Act of 1947, probably qualifies as the world’s first modern smart-growth law.

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