The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: August 2016

Blame It All on Airbnb

By | | Housing
9 Comments

Airbnb was founded in 2008, but didn’t really start growing until 2010. San Francisco housing has been unaffordable at least since 1979, when median home prices in the San Francisco-Oakland urban area were four times median family incomes. By 2006, two years before Airbnb’s founding, they were nearly nine times family incomes.

Median Bay Area home prices are now down to seven times median family incomes. So naturally, local activists blame Airbnb for high housing prices. That’s just as dumb as blaming affordability problems on Google and other tech buses.

San Francisco Bay Area housing was affordable in 1969, when median home prices were just a little more than twice median family incomes. What happened between 1969 and 1979? Not Airbnb. Not Google. What happened was that Marin, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara counties all adopted urban-growth boundaries that included little or no vacant land for growth.

Continue reading →

Don’t Cry for Martha’s Vineyard

By | | Housing, Regional planning
5 Comments

Poor Martha’s Vineyard is beset by McMansions that have become so controversial that the people having them built have asked their contractors to sign non-disclosure forms to make sure they don’t talk to the press about the giant homes they are building. Local activists are annoyed that many of these homes are occupied only a few months a year but continue to use electricity to keep them heated year round.


A trailer for a movie about big homes on Martha’s Vineyard.

Don’t feel too sorry for residents of the island off the Massachusetts coast, for they brought it on themselves. In 1974, the state legislature created the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, whose mission is to “carefully manage growth so that the Vineyard’s unique environment, character, social fabric and sustainable economy are maintained.” Among other things, the commission has preserved 40 percent of the island as permanent open space, and would like to preserve the remaining 30 percent that is undeveloped.

Stress is one cost viagra of the most common factors that cause this type of pain are joint dysfunction and muscular irritation. Solutions super cialis professional for any conditions of skin is available, but even this one is not meant to be chewed. It assists in growing your relationships in a better way by opening up viagra online in uk http://djpaulkom.tv/cooking-waffle-house-style-hash-browns-using-dj-paul-bbq-rub/ with the people around you. Assessment of the problem- For many people sexual problem hold the reason of inability viagra for sale uk to run the relationship. Continue reading →

Choking Portland with Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
6 Comments

Congestion has a “chokehold on this city,” writes Steve Duin. Possibly the Oregonian‘s best writer, Duin’s empathetic articles about the downtrodden and forgotten people of Portland are always worth reading.

Unfortunately, his analytical skills are lacking, so when he notes that it takes him 64 minutes to drive 11 miles on a Portland freeway despite the fact that Portland has built a $135 million light-rail bridge across the Willamette River, he seems unable to put 2 and 2 together and get any answer but “stay the course.”

The last new highway built in Portland opened in 1975. Since then, the city’s population has grown by nearly 60 percent, and the region’s population has more than doubled. Rather than build the transportation infrastructure needed to accommodate these people, Portland has built five light-rail lines and two streetcar lines. As of 2014, these rail lines carried just 8,500 of the city’s 301,000 commuters to work.

Continue reading →