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Monthly Archives: May 2007

Lakewood Gets Ripped Off

By | | City planning
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Deals like this always make you suspicious. Someone bought some land in Lakewood Colorado for $650,000, and eight days later sold it to the city of Lakewood for $1.1 million.

The city, which thinks it got a good deal, plans to use the land for “affordable housing” next to a projected light-rail station. But why didn’t the city buy it eight days earlier when it could have saved almost half the cost? Does the previous landowner feel ripped off when they could have made $1.1 million if they had sold to the city instead of the middle-man?

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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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The Skeptical Planning Professor

By | | News commentary
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Many of things written in this blog in 2007 are mere echoes of statements made by Melvin Webber thirty to forty years ago. Webber, who died last November, was a professor of city planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

The latest issue of Access magazine, which Webber founded fifteen years ago, is a tribute to Webber, with articles by Martin Wachs, Robert Cervero, Peter Hall, Jonathan Richmond, and other researchers who are themselves legendary in the urban and transportation planning fields.

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How Green Can Greensburg Get?

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Last week, I wondered “how many planners today are salivating at the chance to plan the reconstruction of Greensburg, Kansas.” The answer was not long in coming.

The governor of Kansas has announced that she wants to make the reconstructed community “the greenest town in rural America.” She says she wants to “rebuild a better footprint.”

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Urban-Growth Boundaries Are Just Plain Stupid

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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Originally conceived as a way of preventing “leapfrog development,” i.e, development of land some distance away from urban fringes, urban-growth boundaries are now used to prevent any development at the urban fringe at all. This pleases planners, who think we should all live in “compact developments,” and who ally themselves with property owners along the boundaries who want to preserve their scenic views.

The last effort to expand Portland’s boundary required lengthy political battles as landowners who wanted to develop their land fought those who wanted to benefit from someone else’s land remaining undeveloped. In about 1999, Portland’s Metro finally expanded boundary. But very little development has taken place because planners are too busy “planning” the expanded areas to allow anyone to do anything in them. The time between expansion and any actual development seems to be at least a decade.

Meanwhile, Metro is under the gun to meet housing goals and is asking the legislature for two more years before it considers any more expansions. Planners say they are too busy planning the previous expansions to think about doing any more.

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Anti-Town Planning #5: The Woodlands Is the Way It Ought to Be

By | | City planning
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If I had to live in a major urban area, I would like to live in a place like the Woodlands, a master-planned community north of Houston. The difference between the Woodlands and the town plans I’ve critiqued earlier this week is that the Woodlands was planned by a developer, while the other town plans were written by government planners.

Flickr photo by HJPotter.

The Woodlands is a 28,000-acre development that began in 1974. Like other “master-planned communities,” it differs from smaller subdivisions in that it was designed as a complete community, with offices, stores, hotels, schools, parks, and residential areas. Although it includes a mix of uses, it is not, for the most part, “mixed use.” That is, the nine “villages” that make up the residential areas are separate from the retail and commercial areas. But the employment areas provide more jobs than the number of workers living in its residential areas.

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Anti-Town Planning #4: Bandon’s Post-Fire Plan

By | | City planning
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The near-complete destruction of Greensburg, Kansas brings to mind the September 1936 fire that burned my hometown of Bandon, Oregon. As shown below, all but about 16 of the town’s 500 buildings burned to the ground.

This was in the middle of the New Deal and planning was all the rage. Oregon even had a State Planning Board, which viewed this disaster as a great opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of sound land-use planning. To give planners maximum flexibility, the board convinced 80 percent of the property owners in the city to put their land in a property pool. Landowners were given temporary building permits to replace homes and businesses during the emergency, with the understanding that they would have to be rebuilt when the plan was completed.

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Anti-Town Planning #3: Boulder’s Insatiable Demand for Open Space

By | | City planning
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Imagine the state you live in is 98 percent rural open space. Moreover, almost half of that open space is owned by the federal or state governments and will probably never be developed.

Although your county is one of the more urbanized counties in the state, at least 90 percent of the county is rural open space, and well over a third of that is federal or state land. In fact, even though your town’s population doubled in the last ten years, there is still more than one acre of permanently protected open space for every resident in the county.

Boulder in the moonlight.
Flickr photo by Molas.

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San Francisco Dream Home Turns into Nightmare

By | | News commentary
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Last year, someone bought a house in San Francisco “for an almost unheard of price of $525,000.” By “almost unheard of” they mean “incredibly low,” so low that the San Francisco Examiner called it the “cheapest house on the market.” (The house was sold at an auction with bids starting at $400,000.)

You have to live in a pretty warped world to think that $525,000 is a low price for a house. Especially this house. It was only 870 square feet and so dilapidated that the real estate listing warned of “unstable building, floors, dry-rot and foundations. Enter at your own risk.”

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“They were just a wonderful young couple trying to do the American Dream thing and may have gotten in over their heads,” said a neighbor. So the American dream vanishes in a cloud of dust for one more young family. Hope they had good insurance, especially since the house damaged the next-door home as well.

Anti-Town Planning #2: San Ramon City Center

By | | City planning
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In our continuation of Anti-Town Planning Week, we turn to San Ramon, California, where the city council wants to build a new “City Center.” Incorporated less than 24 years ago, San Ramon is a thriving suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is built around an office park started in the 1970s.

Flickr photo of San Ramon by Jeff L. Used by permission.

The city is the world headquarters of Chevron-Texaco and also has North American or California headquarters of such companies as Toyota, AT&T, and UPS. Local retailers include Costco, Whole Foods, Borders, and the usual collection of supermarkets and other shops. The average household income in 2000 was $96,000, putting it well above the rest of the country.

But the city is suffering from an acute case of “downtown envy,” a disease the strikes many Sun Belt cities. Many people, including most urban planners, think that a city can’t be a real city unless it has a distinctive downtown or city center. But in today’s automobile age, developers no longer build distinctive city centers, so cities that have grown up since 1945 often feel they have to subsidize them.

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