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Category Archives: Regional planning

Let’s Be as Dense as Hong Kong

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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Vox‘s Johnny Harris looks at housing in Hong Kong, noting that it is rated the least-affordable housing market in the world. (At least the English-speaking world, China, Japan, and Singapore, which are the housing markets reviewed in Wendell Cox’s 14th International Housing Affordability Survey). Harris shows living conditions roughly similar to the 1890 tenements of New York City documented by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives.

Harris reveals that housing prices aren’t high because Hong Kong has run out of land. Instead, he notes, “Flying over Hong Kong, you start to see that, while yes, there’s a very dense urban landscape, but there’s also a whole lot of green space. Government land-use data says that 75 percent of the land in Hong Kong is not developed.” Continue reading →

Visualizing Land Use

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
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The National Resources Inventory samples the nation’s lands to estimate how much is dedicated to farms, forests, cities, and other uses. Formerly called the natural resources inventory, it is conducted about every fives years by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which itself was formerly called the Soils Conservation Service.

The Antiplanner previously reported on the results of the 2012 inventory, including a special spreadsheet showing urbanized lands that wasn’t included in the published documents. Now, for those people who prefer looking at maps over looking at spreadsheets, Bloomberg has published a series of maps attempting to show the relative amounts of forests, pasturelands, croplands, urban areas, and other land uses in the contiguous 48 states.

For the most part, the maps and explanations are fair and balanced. But there are some elements that can be misleading. First, the second map paints the nation with six vertical stripes, each representing a major land use: pasture/range, forest, cropland, special use, miscellaneous, and urban. Because urban is the eastern-most stripe, it ends up covering eight states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont — as well as parts of New York and Pennsylvania. Continue reading →

Calthorpe: Driverless Cars Will Kill Cities

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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New urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe predicts that “autonomous vehicles will mean death for cities.” To which the Antiplanner responds, “good,” as in “good bye and good riddance.”

But wait — Calthorpe seems to think this is a bad thing. “AVs will only increase sprawl as private vehicles travel farther,” he warns. The reason why people will be able to drive further is because autonomous vehicles will reduce congestion. They will reduce congestion so much, he fears, that “vehicle miles traveled will double and roads will become impassable.” So which is it: will driverless cars promote sprawl by reducing congestion or will they gridlock roads? (The answer is that driverless cars will double road capacities.)

Cities are a means to an end: a place for people to meet, to bring resources together for manufacturing or transshipments, to reduce living costs. But new means of transportation and communication have steadily reduced the need for dense cities to achieve those ends. Continue reading →

Why Rethink Single-Family Homes?

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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“We are in a new century where we need to rethink single-family zoning,” says Robert Liberty, the man who is more responsible than anyone else for Portland’s unaffordable housing. The question any sensible person should ask is just what is behind Liberty’s obsession with and objection to single-family homes?

As of 1989, Oregon law required that Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, maintain housing affordability by regularly expanding Portland’s urban-growth boundary. In that year, Liberty — then head of 1000 Friends of Oregon — conceived of the “land use-transportation-air quality” (LUTRAQ) project. Based on analyses by pro-density consultants, LUTRAQ purported to show that increasing urban densities would lead people to drive less and help clean up the air.

In fact, as USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliani pointed out in 1995, LUTRAQ really showed that density had very little to do with driving. Instead, the LUTRAQ model reduced driving by assuming that every business in the Portland area would charge parking fees at their offices or shopping areas equal to at least one third of downtown parking charges. Of course, the region still has free parking almost everywhere except in downtown Portland. Continue reading →

Watch Out in Minnesota

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation
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If you are a critic of light rail, it would probably be a good idea to avoid the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for awhile. It turns out that light-rail operators in Minnesota can commit manslaughter with impunity.

Last July, a Metro Transit light-rail operator ran a red light in St. Paul and killed a 29-year-old man. Metro Transit tried to fire the operator, but the unions forced the agency to keep him on the payroll. If an auto driver killed someone after running a red light, they could be charged with vehicular manslaughter, but when the St. Paul city attorney contemplated charging the light-rail operator, she learned that trains are exempt from traffic codes unless “gross negligence” is involved.
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This exemption must have been passed by the state legislature when it was controlled by the Democratic Party (or, as they call it in Minnesota, the Democrat-Farm-Labor Party). At the present time, Republicans control the legislature, and one, Representative Linda Runbeck, has vowed to “close this loophole” as soon as possible. Until the legislature does so, be extra careful crossing a light-rail line if you are in the Twin Cities.

Is Texas Running Out of Farmlands?

By | | Regional planning
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An op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News warns that “asphalt is the last crop,” meaning once a farm is paved over, it can never be farmed again. “Every 10 years, Texas loses approximately 1 million acres of prime agricultural lands to development,” the article warns. Written by Bob McCan, who chairs the Texas Agricultural Land Trust, the article encourages farmers and ranchers to put their lands into conservation easements.

In case McCan hasn’t noticed, someone should tell him Texas is a big place. According to the USDA National Resources Inventory, it has nearly 138 million acres of private agricultural land, not counting 14 million acres of forest land, 3 million acres of federal land, and more than 2 million acres of “other rural land.” Fewer than 7 million acres of the state have been urbanized and only about 2 million more have been developed into such things as small settlements, rural roads, and railroads.

Of the 138 million acres of ag land, farmers grow crops on only about 24 million acres. The rest is range and pastureland. That 24 million is less than it was a few decades ago, but more because the per-acre yields of most crops are growing faster than the nation’s population than because any acres have been paved over. Continue reading →

Land-Use Intolerance

By | | Regional planning
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Netflix is advertising a documentary on the story of the Rajneeshee commune in Oregon. The trailer below makes it appear that the problem with the commune was religious intolerance on the part of rural Oregonians. In fact, the real problem was land-use intolerance on the part of urban Oregonians.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was an Indian philosophy professor who decided to become a guru preaching free love and sex. The Indian government wasn’t too happy with his followers’ behavior, which included tax fraud and smuggling, so he decided to move to the United States. If they had moved to Texas, or Kansas, or some other interior state, land use would never have been a major issue. Continue reading →

Economic Freedom & Property Rights

By | | Regional planning
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Libertarians and other free-market advocates agree that protection of private property rights is essential for economic liberty and prosperity. Yet none of the various freedom indices take property rights into account when comparing economic freedom in one country, state, or province to another.

For example, the only measure of property rights in the Fraser Institute’s index of world economic freedom is the “regulatory cost of the sale of real property.” But that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of property rights. What about the regulatory cost of the use of real property? What about regulatory limits on such use? What about the ease with which government can take property by eminent domain? All of these are much more important than the cost of selling property, yet are ignored by the index.

Last month, the Fraser Institute released its latest index of economic freedom for North America, comparing U.S. and Mexican states and Canadian provinces. Like the world index, this one does not measure property rights. Instead, it focuses on the size of government, taxes, and labor markets. The results are sometimes very different from an index of property rights. Continue reading →

A Conservative Ecofascist

By | | Regional planning
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The left-leaning Guardian introduces us to someone who claims to be a conservative environmentalist, Sir Roger Scruton, author of How to Think Seriously about the Planet: The Case for Environmental Conservatism. Scruton worries that the global economy is not sustainable because so many things are heavily subsidized. At the same time, he recognizes that environmentalism today has “became a wholly owned subsidiary of the statist left,” becoming an “ism” as bad as socialism and Marxism.

“They come with massive, worldwide plans for a new form of government that will control our souls and will replace the old, inadequate ways of compromise,” Scruton argues. “It’s essentially the same mindset as imposed communism on the Russians and the Eastern Europeans and the Chinese. To me, that involves a complete misunderstanding of what our relation to the natural world really is and should be, because it’s a desire to control rather than to adapt.”

So far so good. However, he also rejects libertarianism, saying conservatives should not “advocate economic freedom at all costs, but recognize the costs of economic freedom.” In particular, he fears suburban sprawl, corporate farming, and global trade. Continue reading →

Exurbanites Outnumber City Center Residents

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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An article of faith among urban planners is that people–especially Millennials and empty nesters–want to move to city centers. This belief is used to justify upzoning, subsidies to dense downtown housing developments, and restrictions on developments at the urban fringe.

Yet the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, demographer Wendell Cox, has repeatedly debunked this claim. His latest report shows that, not only are city centers not growing particularly fast, exurban populations–people with urban occupations living in essentially rural areas–are growing much faster and now outnumber city center populations by 3 million people.

Cox’s numbers might differ a little from other people’s because he doesn’t use political boundaries to distinguish cities from their suburbs. Instead, he relies on what he calls the “city sector model” that classifies land according to its history. Downtown is the really dense urban core (basically, the part with skyscrapers). The rest of the “city” is the area built before World War II. Areas built between 1945 and 1980 are the first-ring suburbs, while areas built after 1980 are the outer-ring suburbs. Populations in metropolitan areas outside the urbanized area (the area with more than 1,000 people per square mile) are exurbanites. Continue reading →