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.
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.”
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.
Someone asked the Antiplanner if anyone has ever ranked the restrictiveness of land-use regulation by state. I don’t know of any such ranking, but I pointed out that regulation has several dimensions. Spatial regulations try to control where development can take place. Time regulations effectively limit how quickly developments can take place.
Another time dimension has to do with how long regulations have been in place. An urban-growth boundary drawn last year isn’t as restrictive as one drawn thirty years ago. Finally, land-ownership patterns can effectively restrict development even if there are no overt legal restrictions.
Given that complication, here is my estimate of ranking, with states of roughly similar regulation grouped together. Any and all comments are welcome, especially if they can help make this ranking more precise.
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.
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.
Dorothy English wanted to live to be 100 because there were “some bastards I want to get even with.” Specifically, Multnomah County, Oregon, which zoned her 20 acres of land years after she and her husband bought it, thus preventing her from subdividing it into eight parcels for her grandchildren.
She didn’t make it, dying a year ago at the age of 95. But she just may get even anyway.
Smart growth was one of two necessary but, by themselves, insufficient conditions for the housing bubble that led to our current economic crisis, says the Antiplanner’s faithful ally Wendell Cox. Cox’s fully narrated PowerPoint presentation (23.8 MB) at last weekend’s Preserving the American Dream conference shows that housing bubbles in states with smart growth were worse than the Japanese bubble of the 1980s, while bubbles in markets with what Cox calls “responsive zoning” were barely noticeable.
A French economist named Vincent Benard concurs. His presentation (1.9 MB) shows that France also had a housing bubble and that its bubble was also due to land-use regulation. In particular, Benard observed that it can take six years for builders to get approval to build homes. When demand for housing grew in 2000, builders began applying for permits but only received them when the market began to tank in 2006.
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.
In January, Australian smart-growth guru Peter Newman published a book on how smart growth will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A few months before, the Urban Land Institute published a book on the same topic. Last September, California passed a law requiring its cities to practice smart growth to reduce greenhouse emissions.
The Antiplanner will review these books in detail in the future. In the meantime, what kind of assumptions do we have to make to justify using smart growth in order to reduce greenhouse emissions?
Someone sent me this photo album of skinny houses around the world. Many of them are are more creative and interesting to look at than the typical Portland skinny house.
The hypothesis behind skinny houses is that increased densities will allow people to be closer to transit, shops, and jobs, and therefore they will walk, cycle, and ride transit more and drive less. I say “hypothesis” because there is little evidence this is true, or at least that it has more than a tiny effect on travel habits.
