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Monthly Archives: July 2013

Another New Urban Failure

By | | Regional planning
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“Three years after its completion, most of the storefronts remain vacant” in a mixed-use development next to a BART station in Pleasant Hill, California, reports the Contra Costa Times. “Projects that combine housing with retail space are a poor fit for the suburbs,” the paper reports one expert as saying.

Mixed-use developments are the gold ring on the land development merry-go-round for urban planners, most of whom don’t really understand land development. They think that mixed-use developments will lead people to walk more and drive less and therefore try to force them onto neighborhoods, particularly near rail transit stations, using prescriptive zoning.

In the Pleasant Hill case, the developer was probably required to build 34,000 square feet of commercial space in order to get a permit to build 422 luxury apartments. But a few hundred two-person families is not enough to support that much retail space, and people who enter and exit the nearby BART station are too intent on getting to work or home to stop and shop. According to commercial real estate broker John Cumbelich, the Pleasant Hill development could support, at most, about 5,000 square feet of commercial space.

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Is Economic Immobility Due to Sprawl?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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For the second time in a week, Paul Krugman has written about sprawl. This time he is as wrong as the last, when he blamed Detroit’s bankruptcy on sprawl. Now he blames Atlanta’s entrenched poverty on urban sprawl. “The city may just be too spread out,” he says, “so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Krugman quotes a study that finds that one of many factors reducing social mobility include “areas in which low income individuals were residentially segregated from middle income individuals.” But income segregation is very different from sprawl, and can take place in communities of any density. New York City, for example, has pretty high economic segregation.

Krugman adds that Atlanta’s sprawl “would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t.” He obviously doesn’t know the history of mass transit in Atlanta, which had a great transit system until regional leaders decided to build an expensive rail transit system. Since they aimed the rail lines at middle-class neighborhoods and sacrificed bus service to low-income neighborhoods to pay for the rail lines, transit’s share of commuting has fallen by more than 60 percent and per capita transit ridership has fallen by more than two thirds.

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The Failure of Inclusionary Zoning

By | | Housing
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Denver’s urban-growth boundary has made housing expensive. More than a decade ago, the city blamed “failure by the private market to produce enough affordable housing” (see p. 5). To fix this “failure,” the city required developers to build “affordable housing.” Now, the city admits that this ordinance is a failure.

Data from the 2011 American Community Survey indicates that the median value of owner-occupied homes in Denver is nearly four times median family incomes. It should be just two times, which is typical for cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries or other restrictive land-use laws. So housing prices are nearly twice as high as they ought to be.

As this city document explains, Denver’s “inclusionary zoning” ordinance requires developers who build 30 or more homes or condos at one time to sell at least 10 percent of those homes at “affordable” prices. Typically, this means an average of about $40,000 less than market prices, which is likely below the actual cost of constructing the homes. To make up for the losses, developers have to sell the remaining 90 percent for more than they would otherwise.

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High Speed and Low Budgets

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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While it is possible that Spain’s train crash that killed some 80 people was due to a broken rail or other equipment failure, most experts looking at the video below think the problem was simply high speeds. The video shows a train going an estimated 125 mph around a corner designed for 50 mph.

Much attention has been focused on the train’s driver, who apparently has been known to post photos of train speedometers at high speeds (but not more than the speed limits), suggesting he might have been less than fully attentive. But where was the positive train control system, which should have warned the driver and automatically slowed the train if the driver failed to do so?

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The $10 Billion Battle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Senate Democrats propose to spend $54 billion next year on transportation and housing. House Republicans want to spend just $44 billion, but President Obama has threatened to veto such a paltry bill.

Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claim the House bill poses a threat to the nation’s infrastructure, with many citing the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge as an example. But that bridge fell down because it was struck by an oversized truck, not because of any infrastructure shortfall. Besides, the Senate bill only includes $500 million for bridge replacements.

Where will the other $9.5 billion go? Things like Amtrak (half a billion), TIGER grants for such “critical infrastructure” as new streetcars ($1 billion); and $123 million more for New Starts than the House bill. On the housing side, the Senate bill would spend $1.6 billion more than the House on Community Development Block Grants and $75 more than House on “livability” (on which the House proposed to spend zero).

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Bankruptcy and Sprawl

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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More than twenty years ago, Joel Garreau observed that every American central city except Detroit had undergone a renaissance. Detroit’s problem then, and now, seem to be poor governance, something that can’t be fixed by federal subsidies.

Yet someone was bound to blame Detroit’s bankruptcy on urban sprawl, a benign settlement pattern that seems to get blamed for just about everything bad that happens. Surprisingly, perhaps, in this case the blame is cast by Paul Krugman, who claims that “job sprawl” doomed Detroit.

Krugman compares Detroit with Pittsburgh, noting that the latter has experienced a revival since 2005, while Detroit continued to spiral downward. The reason, says Krugman, is that “less than a quarter of Detroit jobs are within 10 miles of the traditional central business district, versus more than half in Pittsburgh.”

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Save the Yellowstone Wolves

By | | Public lands
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Last week, the Antiplanner was fortunate to be a part of a small group of people who met with Dan Wenk, the superintendent of Yellowstone Park. Among the topics of discussion were the reintroduced wolves. At the time 66 wolves were released in 1996, there were more than 25,000 elk in the park, which everyone agreed had led to serious overgrazing.


Wolves hunt a bull elk in Yellowstone. NPS photo.

Most biologists predicted that the wolves would only reduce the elk populations by 20 to 30 percent. In a demonstration of how poor their models were, feasting off the elk allowed the wolf population to grow to more than 1,000 within a decade, while the park’s elk population declined by close to 80 percent.

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Unfeasibility Study

By | | Transportation
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As Detroit enters bankruptcy, an Indiana rail passenger group frets that its state hasn’t wasted enough money on pipe dreams. So it is publicizing a so-called feasibility study for a high-speed rail line from Columbus to Chicago. The study proposes to spend $1.3 billion improving CSX tracks to run trains at 110 to 130 mph, resulting in a Chicago-Columbus trip as short as 3-3/4 hours, or an average speed of about 80 mph.

I say “so-called” feasibility study because it seems like a real feasibility study would take the trouble of asking if it were feasible to operate passenger trains at 110 mph on the same tracks as freight trains when CSX, which owns the track, says 90 mph is the fastest it will allow passenger trains on its tracks “unless freight and passenger traffic were separated.” The study calls for running 24 trains a day (12 each way), which is probably more than CSX wants even at 90 mph.

The feasibility study ignores these limits and simply assumes 130 mph is possible. Everything that follows is just as speculative and unrealistic.

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Governor’s “Advisor” Actually Paid Lobbiest

By | | Planning Disasters
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Before being shut down, the Columbia River Crossing–a consortium of eight government agencies–spent $170 million. The lion’s share of that went to one consulting firm, David Evans and Associates, which was supposed to write the draft and final environmental impact statements for the bridge.

In fact, it turns out that Evans hired a lobbyist to convince the Oregon state legislature to appropriate well over $400 million to built the bridge. But the lobbyist, Patricia McCaig, never registered as a lobbyist or revealed her source of income. Instead, she claimed to be a “special advisor” to the governor.

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The dark nature of the consulting world–where government agencies overpay consultants to do various analyses and then the consultants promote the projects–always seemed apparent. But this is the first case in the Northwest at least where a consultant was caught redhanded covertly spending money lobbying for an expensive project. This is just one more reason why government should avoid doing megaprojects like the Columbia River Crossing, which involved a bridge, a light-rail line, reconstruction of numerous highway intersections, and other work.

High Housing Costs Not Offset by Low Transport Costs

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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Growth-management planners who have made housing unaffordable in California, Oregon, and other states respond that this high cost is offset by lower transportation costs in their cities. They call it the H+T Affordability Index, and the supposed reduced cost of transportation excuses all of the housing affordability problems their plans create.

In fact, most of their cost numbers are hypothetical, and their estimates seem likely manipulated to achieve the result they wanted. Fortunately, we now have a relatively independent source of information that directly contradicts the H+T claim.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a left-wing organization that seems to believe in income redistribution. However, it has no axe to grind about urban sprawl, so when it calculates the cost of living in various cities, it has no incentive to skew the data in favor of heavily planned regions.

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