Monthly Archives: August 2008

If I had waited another day before posting on the future of democracy, I could have had the benefit of reading about Dr. Doom, aka Nouriel Roubini. Roubini is an economist who has been issuing similarly pessimistic warnings about the future of America for several years.

In a recent post on his blog (registration required), Roubini says the “American empire” is in decline for three reasons. First, it “squandered its power by relying excessively on its hard military power in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan,” rather than using “diplomacy and multilateralist approaches.” Second, other countries and regions such as China, Russia, India, and the European Union are catching up. Third, “the US squandered its economic and financial power by running reckless economic policies, especially its twin fiscal and current account deficits.”

I’d like to think that’s pretty much what I said last week. For what it’s worth, I disagree about a few details. I don’t consider Russia to be an economic or political rival. It is not capitalistic enough — property rights are not secure and its economy is based more on crony capitalism than true capitalism. It is growing fast enough, but most of the benefits of that growth go to those at the top.

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The Antiplanner rarely comments on geopolitics, but the conflict in Georgia provokes some broader-than-usual thoughts. This war, and the coinciding Olympics, suggests that we have spent the last seven years worrying about the wrong dangers in the world. While we concentrated on so-called Islamofascists, the real danger facing America and democracy was somewhere else.

Published in 1987, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers makes it clear that, to be a great military power, you first have to be a great economic power. More specifically, you have to be able to build wealth. Kennedy points out that Britain was a superpower in the nineteenth century, and its economy grew throughout the century. But because some other countries were able to grow a little bit faster, by the mid-twentieth century Britain was relatively unimportant.

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One of the perqs of having feet in both the environmental and libertarian worlds is that the Antiplanner gets emails from people of a wide range of political persuasions. But I was still surprised to get an email from someone promising to “bring the good news about Ethanol and renewable energy for American energy independence.” In fact, as the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Ken Green, points out in a recent paper, it is really hard to find any good news regarding ethanol in the United States.

When mixed with gasoline, Green reports, ethanol produces more nitrogen oxides (which, aside from being a constituent of photochemical smog, is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) than gasoline alone. As a result, an article in a recent Science magazine reported that corn-based ethanol “nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years.”

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One of the little surprises in the Antiplanner’s analysis of regional transportation plans was that the plan for Houston — which the Antiplanner normally likes to point to as a paragon of freedom and efficiency — proposed some of the most intrusive anti-sprawl measures. The good news is that Houston’s metropolitan planning organization doesn’t have much power over the cities in its region.

These dense, but non-pedestrian-friendly, townhomes are the kind of new development Houston is getting without zoning or intrusive regulation.

The bad news is that the city of Houston is proposing to regulate urban corridors (meaning rail transit corridors) to promote transit-oriented developments. The web site for the corridor plan contains the usual alarmist language about population growth, and suggests that corridor planning and regulation can do something “about all this growth.”

“We can seize the opportunity we have, knowing that Houston is going to grow considerably, to find ways to shape our city,” says the web page. At least some of the planning is supposed to be voluntary, but when planners write about “shaping our city,” residents should get nervous.
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In certain “core pedestrian zones,” the corridor plans will require the usual pedestrian-oriented designs, including extra wide sidewalks, buildings fronting on those sidewalks, and 75 percent of the fronts of those buildings must be “transparent.”

These are all recent urban planning fads, but I fail to see how they are going to help accommodate the 2 million people who planners predict will move to Harris County in the next 30 years. If it’s density the planners want, developers are already building lots of mid-rise and high-rise developments near Houston’s center, where land values are highest. They aren’t necessarily pedestrian oriented, but they will house lots of people.

In other corridors, these things will be optional but “incentivized” by allowing developers who meet pedestrian-friendly standards to waive other requirements. Now, I really don’t see the point. If the waivable requirements are so unimportant, then why are they required in the first place? It sounds to me like planners are keeping them on the books as a form of extortion, just so they can make developers comply with the pedestrian-friendly design.

The good news is that, even if Houston imposes these requirements, and they prove too onerous, developers can step outside the city and build for the market rather than the planners’ utopias. This, in turn, will pressure the city to minimize or relax any requirements it passes.

The primary mission of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), says its web site, “is to increase homeownership, support community development and increase access to affordable housing free from discrimination.” But in 1992, Congress also gave HUD the responsibility of overseeing and regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs) that buy mortgages from banks.

The purpose of the GSEs is to provide banks with the same kind of assurance about the mortgage market that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is supposed to provide for bank depositors. They are supposed to be for-profit corporations, but with the implicit backing of the federal government, Congress worried that they might take inappropriate risks. HUD oversight was supposed to guard against that.

But the political reality is that secretaries of HUD don’t get rewarded for announcing that Fannie Mae didn’t go bankrupt again this year. Instead, they are pressured by Congress to announce that homeownership rates — especially for historically disadvantaged people such as blacks — are rising.

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The Antiplanner grew up in the Rose City Park neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, zip code 97213, so it is with some pride that I read that Forbes magazine has declared 97213 to be one of the 10 most overpriced zip codes in the U.S. Forbes considers housing overpriced when the monthly mortgage you would have to pay to buy a house is significantly more than the rent for that house. Since few houses are for sale and for rent at the same time, as a proxy, Forbes divides the median home price by the median annual rent on homes with the same number of bedrooms in a zip code.

Frankly, this is just another effort by Forbes to get you to watch one of their advertisement-laden slide shows. So, to save you the time, here are the magazine’s rankings of the 10 most overpriced zip codes:

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