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Category Archives: Regional planning

Will Seattle Spend $10.8 Billion on 50 Miles of Light Rail?

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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Sound Transit, which is way overbudget in the construction of Seattle’s first light-rail line, now wants voters to approve a measure to build 50 more miles of light rail for the modest cost of $10.8 billion (in 2006 dollars). That’s a mere $216 million per mile, which is about four to five times the average cost of light-rail construction elsewhere.

I suspect this is going to be an uphill battle for the transit agency, if only because the Seattle Times article reporting this story emphasizes a much-higher figure of $23 billion (which includes projected inflation and some finance charges). Newspapers that want to promote light rail usually underplay the cost, but the Times feels burned by the last rail plan, which it supported, and which ended up costing far more than was projected.

Sound Transit, which wants to build 50 more miles of light rail, is also running commuter trains. Ridership proved so far below forecast levels that the agency ended up selling many of the commuter cars it had purchased for the operation.
Flickr photo by MGJeffries.

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Measure 37 and Forest Fire

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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“No one should be permitted to construct homes in the ‘fire plain’ any more than we permit home construction in a flood plain,” says my friend, George Wuerthner. Wuerthner recently edited a book on wildfire policy which included a contribution by me about wildfire budgets.

Now Wuerthner contributes an op ed to the Eugene Register-Guard arguing that “measure 37 exacerbates fire hazards” because it allows people to build homes on their own land in places where Oregon’s land-use laws had previously forbidden such construction.

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Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation
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Last week, I reported that Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan says that we need density to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, Salt Lake City’s Mayor Rocky Anderson says that his region should build more light rail in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Both of these ideas are wrong. Building light rail is increasing greenhouse gas emissions in Salt Lake City. Building high-rise condos instead of single-family homes is increasing greenhouse gas emissions in Vancouver.

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Glaeser Stumbles on Regional Governments

By | | Regional planning
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A year ago, New York Times Magazine called Harvard economics Professor Edward Glaeser “the most exciting urban researcher in half a century.” Many of Glaeser’s research papers show that land-use regulation, not demand, is the primary cause of unaffordable housing.

This work has made Glaeser something of a hero in the antiplanning movement, and I’ve unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to speak at several of our conferences (although one of his co-authors, Bryce Adam Ward, gave an excellent presentation at the 2006 Preserving the Amercan Dream conference).

So it was with great disappointment that I read his latest paper latest paper, “Do Regional Economies Need Regional Coordination?” He argues that, since local government regulation is driving up housing prices, one solution is a regional government that could give local governments direction or incentives to provide affordable housing. Residents of Portland, Denver, and other cities with strong regional governments will find this bitterly amusing.

The East Coast was famous for the affordabilty of its post-war housing markets. Housing in the New York and Boston regions did not become unaffordable until the 1980s.

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Impact Fees Are the Wrong Tool for Any Job

By | | Regional planning
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In The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, I suggested that impact fees might sometimes be a good way for cities to pay for the costs of growth. I have since changed my mind. Impact fees are bad under any circumstances.

I was persuaded of this when I reviewed housing affordability in urban areas across the country. I realized that the cost of existing homes closely tracks the cost of new homes. So when government regulations or fees increase the cost of new homes, the price of existing homes also rises.

Will the taxes paid on this new home pay for the services its residents consume?

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What’s Wrong with This Picture?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The Oregonian celebrates the conversion of a dumpy 1950s ranch home into a beautiful craftsman-style home. To the owners, the home’s big advantage was that it was on a half-acre lot.

Making this out of that. Photo from the Oregonian.

The reconstructed home has twice the floor space, a river-rock fireplace, and an island kitchen with a gas stove surrounded by tile and marble. (Go to the article to see more photos.)

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Portland Gets Residents’ Feedback on Vision

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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When former Portland police chief Tom Potter became the city’s mayor in 2005, he immediately announced “VisionPDX,” an effort to “create a vision for Portland for the next 20 years.” Since the previous mayor, who grew up in Brooklyn NY, seemed determined to impose her Brooklynesque vision on Portland with or without their consent, many Portlanders jumped at the opportunity to submit comments to Potter’s visioning program.

In all, the city received 13,000 responses to its questionaires about a vision for Portland, and they don’t offer much comfort to those who praise Portland’s goal of becoming a compact city. Unfortunately, VisionPDX hasn’t yet posted either the answers to the questionaires or its analysis of them on its web page.

But news reports indicate that the analysis finds that “many Portlanders are deeply worried the city is moving backward” and in particular that it “is becoming unaffordable.”

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Housing Markets Are Melting Down

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The U.S. housing market, which helped keep the world economy afloat for the first half of this decade, is deflating. Here are some signals:

  • The Census Bureau reports that sales of new homes in January 2007 were about 20 percent less than in January 2006. All of this decline was in the West (where new home sales fell by 50 percent) and South (where they fell by 11 percent); sales in the rest of the country were about the same.
  • At least twenty-two mortgage companies who lend to subprime borrowers have gone bankrupt in the past two months, leading some to call this a “panic.”
  • Almost 25 percent of existing mortgage debt is under adjustable rate loans whose rates will be adjusted upwards this year — in many cases to rates well above the fixed rates now available.
  • Already, foreclosures are running 25 percent higher than last year.

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Which Transportation Policy Is Better: Houston’s or Portland’s?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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I’ve added a new “loyal opponent” to my list (right), the Public Transit blog, which is run by Michael Setty. In truth, Michael’s loyalty as an opponent is somewhat questionable as he is more willing to listen to alternative views than some of his more radical smart-growth allies. (I hope I don’t reduce his credibility among his peers by saying so.)

In any case, he has a recent post comparing Houston and Portland traffic in 1993 and 2003. In a nutshell, data presented in the post show that Houston built more freeways, while Portland built light rail. Yet traffic congestion grew faster in Houston than in Portland. “These data suggest,” Michael mildly observes, “that some of the main beneficiaries of Portland’s transit investments may be the drivers who remain on the road.”

Did Portland’s light-rail lines significantly reduce congestion? At first glance, the data seem to say so. While this may be debated at length for years to come, I think there are some alternative explanations.

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Tax Subsidies to New and Old Urbanists

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The subsidies mentioned in yesterday’s post about Denver were in the form of tax-increment financing (TIF). For those unfamiliar with the term, tax-increment financing is the principal method of funding urban renewal. An urban-renewal agency draws a line around an area to be renewed, and for the next twenty or so years all property taxes collected on any new improvements in that district — the “incremental” taxes — are used to subsidize the renewal program.

Usually, the agency estimates future tax revenues and then sells bonds to be repaid by those revenues. The bond revenues might be used for infrastructure such as streets, improvements such as parking garages and parks, or they might simply be given to the developer as seed money for the project.

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