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Monthly Archives: July 2012

Fire Season, Again

By | | Wildfire
10 Comments

It’s summer, so there are wildfires. There are wildfires, so people are debating what to do about them. Should the Forest Service cut more trees? Should counties regulate rural land development? Should Congress give the Forest Service and Department of the Interior more money for fire suppression?

The New York Times asked seven experts to address these issues in 400 words or less. Some focus on regulation; others on public land management; still others on fire suppression and fuel treatments.
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Naturally, the Antiplanner opposes regulation of private landowners, saying that the risks they take are between them and their insurance companies. Beyond that, I suggest that the real problem is that the federal agencies have too much money, leading people to become overly reliant on suppression efforts and uninterested in taking the steps they need to protect their properties.

Environmentalists Destroy Boston Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
26 Comments

The Metropolitan Boston Transportation Authority (MBTA, or “T” for short) is in deep financial trouble, with nearly $9 billion of debt and a $3 billion maintenance backlog that is growing more every year. According to a Boston Herald op ed by Harvard researcher Charles Chieppo, the blame for this can be placed on the Dukakis administration and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

When Massachusetts was planning the Big Dig, CLF sued demanding investments in transit to mitigate the air pollution generated by new auto traffic resulting from the Big Dig’s minor expansions in highway capacity. Dukakis settled by agreeing to build 14 new transit projects.

In fact, those transit investments did little or nothing to clean the air. For one thing, relieving congestion actually reduces air pollution. For another, cars today are so clean that persuading people to ride transit instead does little for air quality.

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California Itching to Lose a Decade

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

Last week, the California legislature voted to destroy the state’s economy for another decade. The 21 senators who voted for the measure told the public they were approving a high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but everyone knows they barely have enough money to build from Fresno to Bakersfield.

In voting to borrow $4.5 billion as a down payment on a rail line that is certain to cost at least $68 billion, and more likely over $100 billion, the legislature is risking the state’s entire economic future. The state already has a $16 billion deficit in its budget (which it closed only with one-time tricks and the promise of increased taxes), and the rail line will immediately increase that by more than a quarter of a billion per year, and in the long run (if it continues building) by much more.

This is not about jobs. More jobs are going to be killed by running up tax rates (or further cutting services) to pay for the deficits. This is not about transportation. Though advocates promise fast downtown-to-downtown travel times, only 2.5 percent of Los Angeles-area jobs are located in downtown LA, so few residents will ever have reason to ride the train. This is nothing more than pork barrel.

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Planning Is Destroying Britain

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
33 Comments

The Economist reviews housing prices in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and what do you know, it finds that high housing prices are due to urban planning. “The biggest constraint on development in London is the Green Belt,” says the magazine that calls itself a newspaper. “Tt runs (with perforations) all around London, to a depth of up to 50 miles, and bans almost all building on half a million hectares of land around the city.”

Ah, but Britain has 62 million people in an area slightly smaller than the state of Oregon (94,000 vs. 98,000 square miles), so those greenbelts are needed to preserve farms, forests, and open space, right? Not really.

As a BBC writer points out, urban areas cover just 6.8 percent of the United Kingdom (10.6 percent of England, 1.3 percent of Scotland, 3.6 percent of Northern Ireland, and 4.1 percent of Wales). Moreover, much of the land inside those urban areas is open space, so less than 2.3 percent of England, and even smaller proportions of the rest of the kingdom, have been “paved over.”

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Does Transit Promote Urban Development?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
17 Comments

Back in 1995, the FTA asked transit advocates Robert Cervero (of the UC Berkeley planning school) and Samuel Seskins (of Parsons Brinckerhoff) whether transit let to changes in urban form. After reviewing the literature, they concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely “create” new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment” (page 3). They added that this “redistribution” mainly favored central city downtowns at the expense of the suburbs.

I’ve been citing that study as definitive for many years, but recently someone asked me if there is anything more recent. As a matter of fact, there is.

In 2010, Brookings published Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (volume 3), which included a paper by USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliano and one of her colleagues that addressed the same question. Based on “more than three decades of research,” they “found little evidence that transit investment has had significant impacts on urban structure.”

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Will Screwing Investors Save the Economy?

By | | Housing
23 Comments

Cornell law professor Robert Hockett has proposed a way out of the “mortgage debt impasse” that he thinks is slowing our economy: have the federal government take all of the underwater homes by eminent domain, paying fair market value for the homes, and then sell the homes, hopefully to the previous buyers. Since the federal government will be able to sell the homes for what it paid for them, it won’t lose money, and fewer residents will lose their homes, so it sounds like a win-win solution.

Although the plan has been endorsed by Yale housing economist Robert Shiller, the Antiplanner is not so enthused. Hockett and Shiller barely hint that it is not exactly a win-win plan, and the big losers will be those who invested in mortgage-backed securities. The forced-sale of the homes backing these securities for less than value of the mortgages means many of these investors will lose their money.

No doubt many will say tough luck. But this attitude has become characteristic of the Obama administration, and it probably threatens our economy more than the “mortgage impasse.”

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