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Monthly Archives: June 2011

The History of Home Ownership

By | | Book reviews, Housing
16 Comments

An earlier series of Antiplanner posts looked at the recent financial crisis and the role the housing market played in that crisis. This has led the Antiplanner to look deeper into the history of housing and home ownership.

The Census Bureau began tallying homeownership rates in the 1890 census; before that, American homeownership rates can only be guessed at by the fact that the vast majority of American lived in rural areas and most–roughly two-thirds in 1890–American farmers owned their farms and, by extension, their homes. Between 1890 and 1940, census data found that about 40 to 45 percent of Americans owned their own homes. Then there was a sudden increase to 62 percent in 1960, after which it slowly crept up to 65 percent.

The Antiplanner has always assumed that the 40 to 45 percent of households that owned their homes represented middle-class (white-collar) families, and the 20 percent growth after 1940 represented working-class (blue-collar) families. But as Margaret Garb shows in City of American Dreams, reality is a bit more complicated.

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Do What First?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

The Texas Transportation Institute estimates that commuters wasted $115 billion sitting in traffic in 2009–up from just $24 billion in 1982. But Smart Growth America is still promoting its idiotic “fix-it first” policy.

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The truth is, of course, that Smart Growth America is just anti-roads and is using fix-it first as a subterfuge to oppose new roads. But if the policy makes sense at all, then no new rail transit lines would be built in America until transit agencies clear up transit’s $77 billion maintenance backlog. Do you suppose Smart Growth America would endorse that policy?

Cars: Necessity or Luxury?

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
23 Comments

Some people are chortling over a recent Pew survey that finds the share of Americans who think that cars are a “necessity” is the lowest since pollsters started asking the question in 1973. Perhaps, some are suggesting, that’s because young people aren’t driving as much as older Americans, so we shouldn’t invest much more in highways.

Another interpretation of the numbers is that more people think they should tell pollsters that they don’t need cars as much as they used to. The Antiplanner prefers to rely on revealed preferences rather than survey data. Here are a couple of revealed preferences.

Table B25044 of the 2009 American Community Survey indicates that 113 million out of 123 million American households–that’s 91.1 percent–have at least one vehicle available. Despite the recession, this is up from 105 out of 126 million households (89.7 percent) in the 2000 census (see table H44, summary file 3 or this brief).

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Bullets in a Railway Heart

By | | Transportation
20 Comments

This “news” is a couple of months old, but Caixin Weekly, a Chinese business magazine, has published an extremely critical article about that country’s high-speed rail program. This report probably inspired similar but shorter articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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One theory is that China will continue to waste money on things like high-speed rail in order to persuade the U.S. to bankrupt itself trying to keep up. If the U.S. doesn’t fall for it–and it appears it has not–then China will have to stop building or end up contributing to its own bankruptcy. That’s not so hard to believe considering that Japanese National Railways piled up a $300 billion debt (in today’s dollars) in 1987, which the government was forced to assume and which contributed to that nation’s economic doldrums since 1990.

Driving Alone without a Vehicle

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
6 Comments

According to census data, about 4 percent of American workers–5.9 million–live in households that have no automobiles. Conventional wisdom suggests that these are people who are either too poor to own a vehicle, and we should pity them; or people who for environmental or other reasons have learned to live without a vehicle, and we should admire them.

There may be a third category, however. As demographer Wendell Cox recently discovered, table B08141 from the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey shows how people get to work by how many vehicles they have in their household. It turns out that nearly 1.2 million people who have no vehicles nevertheless drive to work in a single-occupancy vehicle. That represents 20 percent of workers with no vehicles. Another 730,000, or more than 12 percent of people with no vehicles, carpool to work.

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Meet Smokey

By | | Housekeeping
13 Comments

The Antiplanner visited Austin over the weekend to pick up Smokey, an 8-week-old Belgian Tervuren puppy. Smokey is actually a nephew (several generations removed) to Chip.

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As most dog owners know, puppies have two speeds: off and frenetic. Postings are likely to be light this week as I’ll be doing my regular job during the off periods between Smokey’s frenetic periods.

Suburbs Are Still Growing

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
61 Comments

Next time someone tells you about how everyone is returning to the cities, point them to these maps based on the 2010 census. Available for the forty largest urban areas in the United States, they show, almost without exception, the central cities losing population and the suburbs gaining.

According to the mapmakers, “deep blue indicates that the population doubled (or more), pure red means that everyone left, grey denotes no change, and the intermediate tones represent the spectrum of increases and decreases in-between.” The white beyond the urban periphery indicates very low densities.

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A Parking Garage Even (Some) New Urbanists Can Love

By | | News commentary
19 Comments

Architects, even New Urbanist architects, seem to love a parking garage recently built in Miami. In the video below, Andres Duany–the Antiplanner’s favorite New Urban architect–praises the garage as being as “beautifully designed a place as any piazza.”

Flickr photo by Joevare.

In fact, Duany adds, “it is a piazza; it’s a public square in the air” where you can have a party, conference, ball, festival, or revolution. “I very much appreciate this, not only as a work of architecture but as a work of civic activism.” Continue reading →

State of the Subways

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

About thirty years ago, the Antiplanner’s first visited the East Coast, traveling there by Amtrak and riding rail transit lines in as many cities as possible. The Washington DC subway looked like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, with gleaming trains quietly zooming into and out of clean stations that mostly featured high arch ceilings. In contrast, New York City subway cars were covered with graffiti, stations were grimy, and crime was a serious worry.

How things have changed. In the 1990s, Mayor Giuliani saved the city’s subways by, in part, cleaning up the graffiti and controlling the crime. A recent report from the New York Public Interest Research Group finds that New York subways are, for the most part, getting better still, with car breakdowns only once every 170,000 miles in 2010, a 26 percent improvement over 2008.

Meanwhile, Washington subway cars are experiencing breakdowns every 43,500 miles, or more almost four times as frequently as New York’s. One group of cars breaks down every 30,000 miles. A Metro board member calls these cars “dogs,” but he shouldn’t be very proud of the fact that the agency’s newest and most reliable cars break down every 90,000 miles, twice as frequently as New York’s fleet. But perhaps they can take satisfaction in the fact that New York’s worst trains break down every 60,000 miles, or only 38 percent less frequently than DC’s subways.

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