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Monthly Archives: June 2013

A Legal Blow to Cities That Want to Take Your Property

By | | City planning
21 Comments

On Tuesday, June 25, the Supreme Court issued a decision that helps protect people’s property rights from greedy municipalities. That decision ticked off Vermont Law School Professor John Echeverria, who considers it a blow to “sustainable development.” Like many recent property rights cases, the decision was made on a five-to-four vote.

In the case, a Florida property owner named Coy Koontz Sr. wanted to fill and develop 3.7 acres of wetlands. To mitigate the wetland fill, Koontz offered to put 11 acres of his property (about 75 percent of the total) under a conservation easement. But the St. Johns River Water Management District denied the permit, saying it wanted either 13.9 acres of Koontz’s land (leaving him less than an acre, or just 5 percent of the total) for development) or for Koontz to spend a bunch of his money helping the district restore wetlands elsewhere.

Koontz took this to court, citing the Supreme Court’s Nollan and Dolan decisions. In those cases, permits were granted on the condition that the property owners give some of their land to the public. The Supreme Court had held that this was an unconstitutional taking of private property.

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The Non-Devastating Impact of Urban Sprawl

By | | Regional planning
16 Comments

Atlantic Cities has some satellite photos that supposedly show the “devastating impact of urban sprawl.” But it is easy to exaggerate the supposed “impact” of sprawl.

First, pick a fast-growing region like Atlanta or Dallas. Second, pick an aerial photo of the region as it exists today. Third, overlay photos of the same land area in the past. Fourth, make sure your audience knows that development is bad so that the expansion of development to cover your entire map makes it appear there is no undeveloped land left in the universe.

When examined from a broader view–such as the entire United States–urban sprawl has almost no impact at all. The U.S. has a land area of just over 3.5 million square miles. The 2010 census found that all urbanized areas of 50,000 people or more cover less than 87,000 square miles, or less than 2.5 percent of the total. This is up from 2.0 percent in 2000, and 73 percent of that change is due to population growth in the urbanized areas including the addition of 45 areas that had less than 50,000 people in 2000.

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Is Branson Stealing from U.K. Taxpayers?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
1 Comment

In recent weeks, readers of The Guardian who weren’t distracted by the Snowden story have been entertained by a debate between lefty economist Aditya Chakrabortty and entrepreneur Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Airlines, Virgin Rail, and various other companies. The debate actually started a couple of years ago, when Chakrabortty called Branson a “carpetbagger” because, among other things, he bought a failed bank from the British government for less than the government had spent rescuing the bank.

Virgin Pendolino tilting train in London. Wikipedia commons photo by Andrew Butcher.

Branson replied a few days later saying that “99% of our businesses have nothing to do with government at all and have been built in the face of ferocious competition.” Where his companies do work with the government, he added, their goal–as in the case of the bank–has been to turn loss-making enterprises into profitable ones.

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Rewards for Gardening in Public Spaces

By | | News commentary, Transportation
29 Comments

In a public relations coup, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (Metro) gave a certificate of appreciation to a man who voluntarily planted flowers in flower boxes that the agency had been neglecting for years at the Dupont Circle MetroRail station. I’m sorry, did I say “certificate of appreciation”? I meant a letter threatening him with “arrest, fines and imprisonment” if he planted any more flowers or tended any of the more than 1,000 flowers he has already planted.

Henry Docter, who styles himself the “Phantom Planter,” says he has planted flowers in public spaces on four continents. Usually, he tries to remain anonymous, but in this case he feared Metro would mistake his flowers for weeds and poison them. So he wrote a letter telling Metro about the flowers and offered to weed, water, and tend them.

Metro says it is merely worried about liability, but Docter says he is willing to sign a waiver. Embarrassed officials say they probably should have left “the word ‘imprisonment'” out of their letter, but that still leaves “arrest and fines.”

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Adorability or Economy?

By | | Mission
11 Comments

The Antiplanner comments on another ridiculous streetcar plan, this one for Oklahoma City. Minneapolis reporter Marlys Harris responds, however, that streetcars “are adorable. Who wouldn’t want to ride a one-car choo-choo rather than a big, smelly bus?”

Harris is supposed to be an “an investigative reporter and editor with specialties in consumer protection and finance.” Perhaps someone should introduce her to the reality of government finance, which is that the more wasteful a project is, the more people who benefit from that waste will lobby to promote it. It might not hurt to let her know that streetcars don’t now and never did go “choo choo.”

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More Support for Abolishing New Starts

By | | Transportation
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Today, the Cato Institute releases my policy paper on the Federal Transit Administration’s “New Starts” program that gives about $2 billion a year in grants to cities to build new streetcar, low-capacity rail, and other rail transit lines. My basic argument is that nearly all of the billions spent on this program since 1992 have been wasted, mainly because rail transit is obsolete except in a few extraordinary places such as Hong Kong.

The paper starts by quoting FTA administrator Peter Rogoff, who in a 2010 speech chastised the transit bureaucracy for asking his agency for money to build rail lines when they couldn’t afford to maintain the lines they already have. “Paint is cheap, rails systems are extremely expensive,” he said. “You can entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet.” “Bus Rapid Transit is a fine fit for a lot more communities than are seriously considering it.”

My paper points out that Rogoff’s own agency, with the complicity of Congress, is the main reason so many cities want to build rail lines they can’t afford to maintain. Although Congress set competitive grant criteria such as “cost effectiveness,” when the FTA tried to implement that criteria Congress simply exempted favorite projects from the rule. More recently, the FTA has rewritten the rule so it is now meaningless.

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Recreation Fee Testimony

By | | Public lands
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The Antiplanner is testifying this morning before the House Public Lands Subcommittee in favor of allowing federal land agencies to charge dispersed recreation fees (agencies today can charge for developed recreation, but not dispersed). My testimony is only two pages long, as it is supplemented by a just-released Cato Institute report on the same subject.

The report spends several pages debunking arguments against recreation fees, but my testimony concentrates on three arguments in favor. First, my proposal calls for half of all recreation fees to go the Treasury, which will help reduce the cost to taxpayers of managing federal lands.

Second, fees will lead to better land management. In particular, dispersed recreationists (whose activities today are, by law, fee-free) prefer landscapes that have healthy, natural ecosystems; diverse wildlife habitat; and clean water. So dispersed recreation fees will give managers incentives to provide more of those things.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Public lands, Transportation
27 Comments

The Antiplanner is traveling to Washington DC today where I’ll testify tomorrow before the House Public Lands Subcommittee on federal land recreation fees. By an extraordinary coincidence, tomorrow the Cato Institute will release my policy paper recommending that Congress allow the Forest Service, Park Service, and other public land agencies to charge recreationists fair market value to use the public lands.

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They’ll Do It Every Time

By | | City planning, News commentary
26 Comments

A middle-class urban planner sees a working-class neighborhood and says, “I wouldn’t want to live there. That neighborhood must be blighted.” So the planner convinces the city to spend hundreds of millions of dollars revitalizing the neighborhood: clearing older buildings and replacing them with new high-density, mixed-use developments that the middle-class urban planner wouldn’t want to live in but thinks others should enjoy, often tying such neighborhoods together with a billion-dollar rail line.

Lo and behold, the plan “works” in the sense that housing in the area is now more expensive and suddenly the working-class families are priced out of the market. So the middle-class planner says, “What a terrible shame. We need to spend more money subsidizing affordable housing.” This makes the planner feel less guilty even though someone else’s money is used to subsidize the housing and the people getting the subsidized housing are most likely friends of the developer who just graduated from college and are therefore “low income” at the moment even though they can expect to be high income soon.
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Then comes along a middle-class journalist who doesn’t understand the problem. The problem is not, as this article suggests, that rail transit has boosted property values (which it hasn’t, really–see this post to understand what is going on). The problem is that government should have kept out of the development business in the first place.

The Great Society Subway Slowly Grinds to a Halt

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

Some called it the Great Society Subway, and like a metaphor for the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s grandiose plans, the Washington Metro Rail system is slowly breaking down. No less than the Washington Post calls it “a slow-rolling embarrassment whose creeping obsolescence is so pervasive, and so corrosive, that Washingtonians are increasingly abandoning it.” System ridership is down by 5 percent from a year ago even though other transit agencies in the region have seen growth.

“Last Monday morning, all five Metrorail lines were beset by mishaps, the second such one-day calamity in three weeks,” the Post editorial continued. “The comatose escalators; the crumbling ceiling at Farragut North, year after year after year; the funereal lighting; the frequent signal problems; the routine single-tracking that makes weekend Metro use torturous–all of this takes a toll on riders that Metro officials too blithely dismiss.”

Metro’s general manager gets paid $350,000 a year to watch the trains and rails rust away, and as if that isn’t enough next year Metro’s board is giving him a raise to $366,000. One excuse for such high pay for what amounts to a failure is that it wasn’t all his fault; but really, why should managers of rail transit agencies get paid so much more than managers of agencies that only run buses?

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