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Monthly Archives: September 2013

Back from the Grave

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Once declared dead, the $3 billion Columbia River Crossing may yet be built. Despite the Washington legislature’s decision not to fund its share of the boondoggle project, Oregon’s governor is twisting arms and holding a special session of the state legislature today to gain approval (and $450 million in state funds) for the bridge.

Some of the twisting appears to have been done in the Washington, DC office of the Coast Guard, which granted the bridge a permit despite the fact that it will interfere with navigation. The DC office apparently did an end run around the Coast Guard’s Seattle regional office, which had opposed the permit. Oregon has agreed to pay $90 million in compensation to three shipping companies whose operations will be affected by the bridge.

The Columbia River Crossing is a plan to build a new Interstate-5 bridge across the Columbia. The new bridge would have more and wider lanes than the existing one and would also have room for light rail. Some bridge opponents object to the added road capacity; others object to the light rail. All the opponents agree that a replacement bridge isn’t necessary as the existing bridge is in sound condition.

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The Social Cost of Carbon

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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How much should we spend to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? McKinsey & Company says the United States can reduce its emissions to well below recent levels by 2030 if it invests in programs and technologies that cost no more than $50 per metric ton of abated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. But some might argue that won’t be enough; others may say it is too much.

To provide another answer, the Obama administration has estimated the social cost of carbon. As shown in the above chart, the cost depends on the year the gases are emitted; the discount rate; and whether you believe the average cost estimate or an estimate at the 95th percentile of the high end of costs. Costs rise for gasses emitted in the future because they are supposed to have more serious and irreversible consequences.

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Should Obama Veto O&C Lands Bill?

By | | Public lands
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The Obama administration has threatened to veto a bill that would put western Oregon forest lands in a trust to be managed for the benefit of Oregon counties. The Antiplanner agrees that this is a bad bill, but for different reasons than Obama.


A sign of the 1980s–BLM clearcuts were even more aggressive than those of the Forest Service. Although this photo was taken in 2006, the BLM has sold far less timber in the last two decades than the two decades before that. Flickr photo by Francis Eatherington.

The Oregon & California (O&C) Railroad land grant lands have a long and sordid history. Way back in 1866, Congress granted millions of acres to anyone who built a railroad from Portland to San Francisco, on the condition that the railroad sell them to actual settlers in amounts no more than 160 acres for no more than $2.50 an acre. Most of the lands were not really suited for farming, so the railroad sold larger parcels and sometimes for more money. As a result, in 1916 Congress took back about 2 million acres of as-yet unsold land from the railroad. Despite the O&C name, the lands are exclusively in Oregon.

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It’s the Economy, Stupid!

By | | Housing, Transportation
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At least once a week, the Antiplanner encounters an urban plan that assumes that millennials and other young people will be much less inclined to drive cars and own their own homes than Americans have been in the past. But a new study from researchers at UCLA reaches the same conclusions as other researchers reported by the Antiplanner: young people drive less because of the weak economy, not because they prefer to walk and take transit.


Is this the American Dream?

Similarly, a 2013 survey from PulteGroup, a home builder, finds that the vast majority of people between 18 and 34 aspire to own their own homes. Among those whose incomes are above $50,000, 65 percent say they hope to buy a home in the next year. Similar results were found from a 2012 poll by Better Homes & Gardens Realty and a 2011 survey by the National Association of Home Builders. Far from appreciating multifamily housing, the greatest fear of young people in New Zealand is that they will be stuck in apartments.

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Piling Subsidies on Subsidies

By | | City planning
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Portland has a history of piling on subsidies to support subsidies. Depending on who you talk to, it either subsidizes rail transit to support subsidized high-density developments or it subsidizes high-density developments to support subsidized rail transit.


Like so much of Portland’s government-funded infrastructure, the twin towers of Portland’s convention center have no structural function but exist–at who knows what cost–solely because they are pretty. Wikimedia commons photo by Cacophony.

Now it is about to decide to build a subsidized hotel in order to support a subsidized convention center. Advocates imply that the hotel will pay for itself, but the truth is that an $80 million subsidy to Hyatt will come mostly out of taxes paid by other hotels in the city. Hyatt will pay another $120 million, getting a $200 million hotel for 60 percent of the cost.

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Recent Presentations

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner gave a presentation on property rights in Ottawa on Saturday, September 14, and a presentation on Plan Bay Area in Novato on Tuesday, September 17. The Ottawa presentation is downloadable as an 11.6-MB PDF. The Bay Area presentation is downloadable as a 16-MB PDF or a 57-MB zip file containing the PowerPoint show plus two Click on cialis no prescription more information now and be a man again. All the medicines are named as prescription cialis for getting over the issue of erectile dysfunction. Regular use of purchase generic levitra these herbal supplements offers effective cure for sexual disorders and keeps you in good health. Potential causes of this abnormal condition in which gentile of male cannot viagra without prescription canada retain its erection and plays a key role in making one impotent. videos of driverless cars.

Any one is free to distribute, use, or borrow from these presentations. I make every effort to use photographs that are in the public domain or under a creative commons license, but may have accidentally included some that are copyrighted, so it is best to try to find the photo’s origin before publishing the photos.

Happy Birthday, James J. Hill

By | | Mission
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Today is the 175th anniversary of the birth of James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railway and one of the great entrepreneurs of the late 19th century. As a railfan, the Antiplanner likes Hill because the Great Northern has always been my favorite railroad. It is only a coincidence that Hill’s politics were pretty similar to mine.


Hill in 1915.

Wikipedia describes Hill as a Bourbon Democrat, meaning a classical liberal who supported free trade and opposed government subsidies and legislative efforts to protect corporations from competition. As I detail in an article that should soon be published by the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, Hill also believed that the federal government should stay out of conservation issues as it would likely do more harm than good.

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Who Should Cure the Obesity “Epidemic”?

By | | News commentary
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The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) is worried about “controlling the global obesity epidemic.” A recent report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on “The State of Food and Agriculture” frets over obesity almost as much as it does malnutrition.

The U.N.’s increasing attention to this issue have conservatives worried about another threat to our sovereignty. “The last thing the world needs is yet another anti-liberty, wealth-redistributing response to an alleged crisis,” says Michael Tennant, a writer for the New American, which is published by the John Birch Society.

The Antiplanner isn’t too worried about the United Nations trying to control what Americans eat. But the same type of UN people who want to “control” obesity inhabit the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. Moreover, their agenda is often less oriented to fixing obesity than it is toward using obesity as an excuse for regulating land-use patterns.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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Tomorrow, the Antiplanner is flying to Ottawa to participate in a conference on property rights. After that, I’ll fly to San Francisco to speak twice on Tuesday, September 17.

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The Future of Wildfire

By | | Wildfire
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The 2013 fire season is nearly over, and while it is too soon for a complete post-mortem, we know a few things about this year’s fires. As of September 10, about 36,275 fires to date have burned just under 4 million acres (report is updated each day), which is well under the last decade’s average of more than 57,000 fires and 6.4 million acres per year.


Dumping money on the fire.

A couple of weeks ago, the Forest Service said it had spent about $1 billion on fire suppression so far, and that it had to “borrow” $600 million from timber and other funds to keep up the hard work of pretending to put out fires. The Department of the Interior tends to spend about a quarter to a third as much as the Forest Service each year, so total federal spending this year probably came somewhere close to $1.5 billion.

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