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Monthly Archives: October 2018

BART Can’t Solve Bay Area Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
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Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 2923, which gives BART the authority to ignore local zoning rules and build high-density housing on its own land in the Bay Area. This bill faced fierce opposition from mayors and city councils in Contra Costa County, but was supported by affordable housing advocates.

Ignoring the debate over density at the moment, what makes anyone think that BART, which can’t even effectively run a transit system, can suddenly become an expert housing developer? BART estimates that, with passage of this bill, it will be able to build 20,000 units of housing, about a third of which will be “affordable” (which in the Bay Area can mean affordable to people who earn $115,000 a year or less). While the region could use 20,000 housing units, there is no reason to think that BART can build them affordably or that high-density housing can even be affordable.

BART is well known for the cost overruns, maintenance problems, and crime problems on its transit system. It will be interesting to see how it applies these skills to housing. It’s hard to imagine the results will be very desirable. Continue reading →

Watch Antiplanner vs. Human Transit Forum Live

By | | Transportation
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Blacks and Single-Family Housing

By | | Housing
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Over the past decade, the share of American households who live in single-family detached homes has remained fairly constant at 61.5 percent plus or minus a couple of tenths of a percent. But the share of non-Hispanic whites who live in single-family detached homes has grown slowly but steadily from 68.4 percent in 2007 to 69.0 percent in 2017. At the same time, the share of blacks who live in single-family detached homes has declined from 48.3 percent in 2007 to 46.4 percent in 2017.

Some people think I’m imposing a cultural bias when I say that single-family detached homes are the most preferable type of housing recorded in table B25024 of the American Community Survey, which also includes single-family attached (row houses), duplexes, apartments of various sizes, mobile homes, boats, and recreation vehicles. Many urban planners believe that multifamily housing is superior, but many of those planners themselves live in single-family homes. It appears that planners’ eagerness to put other people in multifamily housing may have its greatest effect on low-income people, of whom blacks are disproportionately represented.

In fact, in some places it appears that blacks are losing out to non-Hispanic whites in the choice of housing stock. In sixteen states and a distressingly large number of counties, cities, and urban areas, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites living in single-family detached homes grew even as the percentage of blacks shrank. Continue reading →

Watch Human Transit vs. Antiplanner Forum Live

By | | Transportation
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Calculating Transportation Subsidies

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Highway subsidies averaged 1.7 cents per passenger mile in 2016, an increase from 1.2 cents in 2015. The increase was due to a massive infusion of general funds into the federal Highway Trust Fund, which was necessary because Congress doesn’t know how to keep spending within its revenues.

This calculation was based on table HF-10 for the 2016 Highway Statistics, which the Federal Highway Administration finally released last week. (The table is dated August 2018, but I check regularly and it hadn’t appeared before last week.) This table shows where highway money comes from, and in 2016 $118 billion came from general fund appropriations and other taxes such as income or property taxes. To calculate subsidies, I deduct from this the diversions of gas taxes and other highway user fees to mass transit and other non-highway uses, which in 2016 totaled to $33 billion.

The result is a net subsidy of $85 billion, up from $59 billion in 2015. The 2015 table shows that 97 percent of the subsidy in that year was at the local level, which is typical of most years. But in 2016, more than half the subsidy was at the federal level. The states, meanwhile, actually diverted nearly $6 billion more from highway user fees than they spent out of general funds. Continue reading →