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Category Archives: Regional planning

Junk Science Week: #2 – Density & Congestion

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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I’ve previously discussed the myth that density relieves congestion, yet it persists. Most recently, planners in Fairfax County, Virginia say they want to put thousands of high-rise apartments in Tysons Corner in an effort to increase the density and relieve congestion around proposed rail stations.

Planners claim that Ballston, a rail station on the DC Orange line, proves that this strategy is successful. The opening of the Ballston station in 1979 led to a lot of transit-oriented development, and today many people in the area walk or take transit to work.

However, planners fail to mention that a major freeway, I-66, opened at about the same time, and it probably did more to stimulate development than the rail line. At least, other stations that were not close to new freeway interchanges failed to develop as planners hoped.

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Junk Science Week: #1 – A Sense of Community

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
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This is Junk Science Week at the Antiplanner. Each day, I will present an example of how planners rely on junk science to justify some of their more inane ideas. Today, I will focus on New Urbanism and the sense of community.

First, it is worthwhile asking why planners seem to believe in so much junk science. In previous posts, I’ve presented reasons why planning can’t work: the systems planners want to plan are simply too complicated for anyone to deal with. Because there is no real scientific support for planning, planners instead turn to junk science.

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The Problems with Infill

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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For many years, Salem — Oregon’s capital — was a sleepy, slow-growing town. The legislature met in the capitol building (designed, some say, to look like a tree stump) only six months every two years. So the city did not attract a lot of the high-powered lobbyists that you find in Washington, Sacramento, or other capitals with full-time legislatures.


Oregon’s capitol building in the state capital of Salem; photo from salemoregon.com.

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The Incentive Problem: Why Planners Always Get It Wrong

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
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Government planning fails because planners face the wrong incentives. Instead of being rewarded for doing good things for their communities, they are rewarded mainly for pleasing other planners. This incestuous system is a recipe for failure.

In a previous post, I listed seven reasons why government planning — that is, long-range, comprehensive planning that often regulates other people’s property — cannot work. I’ve discussed four reasons in detail, and now it is time to address reason number 5: the Incentive Problem.

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For Sale: Closet for $335,000

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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From London, the least-affordable housing market in the world, comes news that a 77-square-foot closet can be yours to live in for just $335,000 (plus an estimated $59,000 to clean it up and add such luxuries as electricity and heat).

Such high prices are the result of green belts and an anti-housing planning process. While this closet is in one of the wealthier parts of London, other recent real estate deals in England include:

Planning Makes World Housing Unaffordable

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Urban areas
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Urban planners have made housing unaffordable in places like San Jose and Portland. But planning has created affordability problems that are at least as serious in Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

That’s Wendell Cox’s conclusion in his third annual housing affordability survey, which looks at housing prices in 159 housing markets in the United States and British Commonwealth countries.

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More on Why Long-Range Planning Fails

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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Commenter Dan says that my previous post on problems with long-range planning used “outdated examples,” so let’s look at a current example of long-range planning. The Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) published its Metro Vision 2030, a long-range land-use plan for the Denver metro area, in 2005. That makes it a twenty-five year plan.

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More on Modeling: Cities Are Queerer Than We Can Imagine

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
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Some planners and economists once built a model of their city. They assumed all the jobs were downtown and people wanted to minimize the combined cost of housing and commuting. How far, on average, would people live from work?

The model said, “One mile.” But census data showed that people actually lived an average of seven miles from work.

The planners and economists had totally opposite responses to this answer. The economists assumed there was something wrong with the model, and set about refining it. Instead of a monocentric model in which all jobs were downtown, they created a polycentric model that spread jobs across several different job centers. The revised model said people would live a little more than two miles from work.

“Naturally we don’t expect the real world to fit the model perfectly,” wrote the economists, “but being off by a factor of seven or even three is hard to swallow.” The economists concluded that the model needed much more refining.

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See a Planning Disaster at the 2007 Preserving the American Dream Conference

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation
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San Jose is one of the greatest urban planning disasters in the country. As the heart of Silicon Valley, the region’s economy should be booming. Instead, growth was extremely slow in the 1990s–less than 0.7 percent per year–and the 2001 recession caused it to lose 17 percent of its jobs.

San Jose was probably the fastest-growing region in the country in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining 40,000 people per year. But in 1974 a new city council decided to “save” San Jose from becoming like Los Angeles, which they thought was a sprawling, low-density region with too many freeways. So they drew an urban-growth boundary around San Jose, thus “saving” thousands of acres of marginal pasturelands from development. But the results turned out to be a disaster.

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