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Monthly Archives: March 2016

Shortages and Abundance

By | | Regional planning
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Los Angeles has some of the least-affordable housing in the world. In 2014, median home prices there were 7.5 times median family incomes, beating out San Francisco (7.0 times), Honolulu (6.9 times), San Jose (6.8 times) and New York (5.1 times).


Developing this orange grove will have no impact on orange prices, but could go far to helping make housing more affordable. Wikipedia photo by Ricraider.

So naturally, some people in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles and part of the Los Angeles urban area, think it is vitally important to protect farms and open space, and they are seeking approval of a measure that would require a vote of the entire county before any land could be rezoned for development. Median home values in Ventura County were just 5.8 times median family incomes in 2014, more because of incomes, which are a third higher than Los Angeles County, than home prices, which are just 4 percent higher than LA County. The open-space measure will serve to make housing even more expensive while it protects a resource that is already abundant: open space.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is heading today for London, followed by a rail trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. From there, I’ll participate in a Free-Market Road Show, giving lectures in thirteen cities in Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans. That will be followed by a short rail tour of Britain where I’ll try to Rosemary is a tested cure for tinnitus that particularly sildenafil 10mg occurred due to high blood pressure or circulatory conditions. Generic cheap sildenafil Ciallis is really effective and safe. Best Ways cialis sale online To Celebrate The Holidays Give Back By Hosting Thanksgiving. These may involve lighting scented candles, decorating the bed discount generic levitra with their partner. learn first-hand how well that nation’s rail privatization has worked.

I’ll try to keep up postings on the Antiplanner, but I’ll be spending a lot of time en route and so may miss some days. If you are in southern Europe, I look forward to seeing you during this trip.

Donald Trump Is a Class Act

By | | News commentary
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Working class, that is. Though Trump himself doesn’t have a working-class background, he has focused his campaign on white, working-class voters. This is appalling to both middle-class progressives and middle-class conservatives because they don’t understand what it means to be working class.

Remember, the working-class includes people (and their families) who earn their incomes through physical labor while the middle-class is made up of people who earn incomes through mental labor. In general, members of the middle class have a bachelor’s degree or better while members of the working class don’t. As it happens, only about 30 percent of working-age Americans have a bachelor’s degree or better, so the vast majority of potential voters are working class.

Economists have excellent arguments in favor of free trade. Most intellectuals (who by definition are middle class or better), whether progressive or conservative, support free trade, so they can’t understand how many people support Trump’s “xenophobia.” But the economists who make those arguments are middle class, while it is working-class jobs that are threatened by the export of manufacturing jobs to other countries, so the working class is thrilled by Trump’s rhetoric.

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Will Miami Change Mass Transit?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Betteridge’s law states that, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” While there are exceptions, a headline in the Guardian reading, “Could Miami’s rail project be test model that could change mass transit in US?” isn’t one of them.

The article claims that Miami is installing a new light-rail system being built with the financial support of Hitachi and Ansaldo. None of this is true. What is true is that Miami is spending close to $314 million buying new railcars from Ansaldo (now a subsidiary of Hitachi) that will operate on the city’s 32-year-old heavy-rail system, a system that is such a failure that it should have been scrapped rather than supplied with new and expensive ($2.3 million apiece) railcars.
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It’s ironic that a left-wing publication like The Guardian is effectively acting as a corporate mouthpiece for an international conglomerate. But all you have to do is mention the words “public transit” and progressives will fall over themselves to support you no matter how expensive and ridiculous your plans.

Sacramento Transit Crashing and Burning

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Sacramento’s Regional Transit District (RT for short) is facing an existential crisis. The region’s transit ridership fell by 22 percent between 2009 and 2014, and preliminary information indicates another 6 to 7 percent decline is likely in 2015. The agency’s January, 2016 performance report shows a 9 percent decline from January 2015.


A light-rail train trundles its way through downtown Sacramento. Flickr photo by PaulKimo9.

Some of this downward spiral is due to low gas prices, but much of it is due to an 18 percent reduction in bus service and a 7 percent reduction in light-rail service between 2009 and 2014. Declining tax revenues after the 2008 financial crisis forced these service cutbacks. In turn, reduced ridership means reduced fare revenues, and RT has responded by raising fares, which is not likely to do ridership any good. RT is also thinking about asking voters for a tax increase, but with just 2.7 percent of the area’s commuters taking transit to work, support for the transit system may be slim.

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Growth Management Violates Fair Housing Act

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A new report from Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute argues that Hawaii’s land-use laws must be repealed because they discriminate against low-income minorities. Hawaii was the first state to pass a land-use law in 1961, and not coincidentally it has the least affordable housing in the nation.

The 2014 American Community Survey found that median home prices in Hawaii were 6.7 times median family incomes, compared with the national average of 2.7. These high prices had pushed low-income minorities to leave the state: while urban Honolulu had grown by 12 percent between 2000 and 2010, the urban area’s black population declined by 4 percent.

Hawaii’s 1961 land-use law divided lands in the state into urban, agriculture, and conservation (later a fourth category, rural, was added). While the supposed purpose was to protect Hawaii’s agricultural sector, in fact it destroyed it because high housing prices increased labor costs and plantations and canneries can’t compete with those in places like Fiji and Costa Rica.

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Happiness Is a Low-Density Suburb

By | | Regional planning
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How do you measure happiness? The Antiplanner isn’t sure, but recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all. The effect isn’t as pronounced for especially intelligent people, the researchers concluded, but it was still there.

One reason why people in some cities may be unhappy is the high cost of living there. The Washington Post asks “why it seems impossible to buy your first home.” The paper doesn’t bother answering the question, but the cities discussed in the article–Portland, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Washington, and several California cities–all are under some form of growth management. All but Boston and Washington have urban-growth boundaries, while Boston and Washington are surrounded by counties that have passed highly restrictive zoning codes prevention new home developments.
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In addition to making housing unaffordable, growth management makes urban areas dense. So, the question is: is it the density that makes people unhappy or the unaffordable housing? One alternative possibility is that unhappy people are attracted to dense, expensive areas, but I don’t see why that would be true. I suspect that density itself is not the problem, but things that are often (but don’t have to be) associated with density, such as a higher cost of living and traffic congestion, are the real keys to urban unhappiness.

BART Is Falling Apart Too

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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As if it were jealous of all of the attention that has been focused on the DC Metrorail system, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system is having its own maintenance problems. Its railcars are old and need to be replaced; last week a series of mysterious power surges disrupted trains; and the agency recently admitted that many of the security cameras on its trains are either fake or broken.

In response to these problems, BART sent out a series of less-than-apologetic tweets to its customers listing a variety of excuses for its failings. “Planners in 1996 had no way of predicting the tech boom – track redundancy, new tunnels & transbay tubes are decades-long projects,” says one. “BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality,” adds another.

The agency is apparently arguing that it needs more money, but it’s really making the case against a rail transit technology that can’t quickly respond to changes in demand because it is too expensive and time-consuming to expand. For example, instead of doing basic maintenance or expanding capacity where it was needed, BART–like the Washington Metro–decided to build new lines that aren’t needed and that will only add to its long-term maintenance woes.

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Mobility, Planners, and Poverty

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

It’s amazing how someone can look at a basic set of facts and come up with completely the wrong conclusion. Such is an article in The Atlantic blaming urban poverty on highways.

“City planners,” says the article’s writer, Alana Semuels, “saw the crowded African-American areas as unhealthy organs that needed to be removed. To keep cities healthy, planners said, these areas needed to be cleared and redeveloped. Highway construction could be federally funded. Why not use those federal highway dollars to also tear down blight and rebuild city centers?”

Semuels then continues with the usual claims that highways divided neighborhoods and drained the cities of wealthy residents who moved to the suburbs, “taking with them tax revenues, even though their residents still used city services.” The result was concentrations of poverty in the cities.

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Natural Resources Inventory

By | | Useful Data
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The pace of urbanization of rural lands has dramatically slowed, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s recently published 2012 Natural Resources Inventory. Between 1982 and 2002, the amount of developed land was growing faster than 2.5 percent per year, but the rate slowed to less than 1.5 percent per year after 2002 and less than 1 percent after 2007.


Click image to download the 2012 Natural Resources Inventory summary report (6.7-MB PDF).

Conducted every five years, the Natural Resources Inventory uses around a million sample points to estimate the uses of land throughout the United States. Although the inventory includes Alaska, Hawaii, and island territories, for some reason NRCS publishes the data for these in separate reports which are not yet available for 2012. However, the contiguous 48 states represent the bulk of America’s most productive farms and forests, so the new report provides a good indication of their status.

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