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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.”
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:
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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.
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.
For my final essay during this Junk Science Week, I decided to focus on New Urbanism and Crime. If you’ve already read the article on this subject that appeared in Reason magazine two years ago, this will be redundant. But the story is so revealing of planners’ methods that it bears repeating.
In 2001, the American Planning Association published a book titled SafeScape that purported to show how certain urban designs can make neighborhoods safer from crime. Yet it was just junk science. In fact, to call it junk science might be too kind.
Everyone knows that the suburbs made us fat. How do we know this? Because some junk scientists at some pro-planning advocacy groups put out a press release that claimed they had proven that suburbanites were fatter than city dwellers.
In fact, their research proved no such thing. But they did not hesitate to argue that their “proof” showed that America needs “to to invest in making America’s neighborhoods appealing and safe places to walk and bicycle,” which — to planners’ way of thinking — means rebuilding suburbs at higher densities.
