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Monthly Archives: December 2008

Land Supply in Victoria

By | | Regional planning
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Some commenters on this blog still do not believe that growth management makes housing unaffordable. But the premiere of the Australian state of Victoria is convinced otherwise. Over the protests of planners, he has decided to add enough land to Melbourne’s urban-growth boundary to build 134,000 new homes.

This is in response to Melbourne’s extremely high median home prices, which Wendell Cox says are more than seven times median household incomes. (For references, median home prices in Houston — and almost anywhere else that doesn’t have growth management — are about two times median family incomes.)

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Northern Virginia Transportation Conference

By | | Transportation
52 Comments

Presentations from the American Dream Coalition conference I spoke at yesterday:

John McClain (George Mason University): Northern Virginia’s Economy & Trends (2.9 MB)

Alan Pisarski (author of Commuting in America: Commuting Patterns Today & Tomorrow (4.8 MB)

Sam Staley (Reason Foundation): Mobility First (5.7 MB)

Tom Rubin (American Dream Coalition): Rail Performance in the U.S. (12.1 MB)

Gabriel Roth (Independent Institute): Faster by Bus (324 KB)

Corey Stewart (Chair, Prince William County Board of Supervisors): Transportation in Prince William County (1.2 MB)
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Alisdair Cain (National Bus Rapid Transit Institute): Mobility with BRT (22.6 MB)

John Palatiello (America Moving Forward): Public-Private Partnerships Really Work (2.9 MB)

Chris Walker: Transforming the Dulles Region (7.0 MB)

Randal O’Toole (Cato Institute): Transportation, Energy, & the Environment (7.4 MB)

Wendell Cox (Demographia): The Costs of Smart Growth (29.7 MB)

Unfortunately, the day before the conference, the FTA succumbed to pressure from the Virginia Congressional delegation and reversed its position on Dulles rail.

FAIL: Capitol Visitor Center Opens This Week

By | | News commentary
41 Comments

With great fanfare appropriate to its great cost overruns, members of Congress opened a new visitor center at the foot of the nation’s capitol building. “What was conceived in the 1990s as a sensible $71 million celebration of democracy,” opined Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, “turned into a half-billion-dollar [actually, $621 million, more than $1,000 per square foot] shrine to legislative excess,” including an $85 million TV studio for senators.

Artist’s rendering of the Capitol Visitor Center.

Which, of course, makes it a great example of how representative democracy actually works.

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Trillions Are the New Billions

By | | Meltdown
4 Comments

Numerous news stories report that the cost of the “bailouts” so far has “reached” $8.5 trillion. Some more cautious stories say they “could” reach $8.5 trillion. ABC News Chris Cuomo says reassuringly that we might get about half back in loan repayments.

The source of this $8.5 trillion is apparently Bloomberg, and their scorecard is here. First, the totals don’t add to $8.5 trillion, only $8.35 trillion. But that’s quibbling. A closer look reveals a far greater portion of the claimed $8.5 trillion isn’t real.

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Bubbles, Panics, and Recessions

By | | Book reviews, Meltdown
49 Comments

In the past thirty years, the world economy has suffered several major bubbles. First came the Japanese stock market and property bubbles that peaked in 1989. Scandanavia suffered real estate and stock bubbles at about the same time. These were soon followed by stock market and real estate bubbles that peaked in southeast Asia in about 1997. High-tech and telecommunications bubbles (which some count as two different bubbles) peaked in 2001. Finally, we have the current housing bubble that peaked in 2006.

Are these bubbles more frequent than in the past? Are all of these bubbles somehow related? Why is real estate connected with most of these bubbles? What tools do central bankers and other government agencies have to prevent or minimize the bubbles?

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Supermarkets: Too Much Diversity?

By | | Entrepreneurs
31 Comments

The big news in Sisters, the nearest town to the Antiplanner’s exurban home, is the grand opening of a new 43,500-square-foot Ray’s supermarket. The new store is more than 50 percent larger than the one it replaces and new features include a “wine cellar” with 2,200 different kinds of wine; an olive bar; and a bulk-food section with hundreds of different grains, flours, and spices.

These things may not seem impressive to people living in big cities, but Sisters’ population is only about 1,500 people. As one customer gushed, “you feel like you’re walking into a Safeway,” but then you remember, “This is Sisters.”

The new store probably carries at least 30,000 different products — known in the retail industry as stock-keeping units or SKUs. Yet this is only in the middle of the full range of food store offerings in this country.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
23 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying back to Washington today to go to various meetings. Most notably, on Thursday, December 4, I will speak at a conference about transportation. If you are in the area, I hope you can attend.

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