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Monthly Archives: February 2019

What Is a Mansion?

By | | Housing
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“Fire Damages Del Mar Mansion,” NBC San Diego News reported yesterday. The mansion in question, the story added, had three bedrooms, three baths, and 2,242 square feet.

Merriam-Webster defines “mansion” as “a large, imposing residence.” The Free Dictionary says it is “a large, stately house.” Call me old fashioned, but 2,242 square feet doesn’t seem that large, imposing, or stately to me. Maybe compared with tiny homes it is, but even in California, most people have not yet been squeezed into tiny homes.

What is large about the house is the value: according to Zillow, it is currently worth about $5.3 million. That’s not because it has a great ocean view: it sits four houses back from the ocean and its views are clearly blocked by bigger houses in front of it. A nearby house that does sit on the ocean, but is only 1,851 square feet, is currently on sale for $11.8 million. These high prices are due to California’s various anti-growth policies. Continue reading →

Sanity Reaches Sacramento

By | | Transportation
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that he is cancelling the state’s high-speed rail project. The project “as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long,” he argued, and he doesn’t see “a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.” (a phrase he got backwards).

Originally projected to cost $20 billion, then $33 billion, then $68 billion, and most recently $77 billion (but it would undoubtedly be even more), the state has never found the resources to fully fund even the lowest, much less the latest, cost estimate.

Newsom said the state will complete the 164 miles it is building between Merced and Bakerfield, allowing Amtrak to run its trains a little faster in that corridor. Amtrak’s San Joaquin, which goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles on that route, carries about a million trips per year and runs two-thirds empty. Amtrak claims the train lost only $11 million last year, but it doesn’t count depreciation and it counts state subsidies to the train as “revenues,” so the real loss is much larger. Continue reading →

Housing under the Green New Deal

By | | Housing
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposal didn’t say much about housing, other than it should be “affordable” and “adequate.” However, Architectural Digest has filled in the blanks to show what “a ‘Green New Deal’ would look like for architecture.”

Surprise! It’s New Urbanism, that is, three- to five-story apartment buildings, often with ground-floor shops. At least, that’s what the photos in the article show.

The text of the article says that buildings that “receive energy along a one-way artery from a faraway grid” would be replaced by buildings that are “mini power plants that can not only produce enough energy to supply their own needs, but also fuel vehicles and send excess energy back to the grid.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but why did the editors choose to use Greenwich Village-like photos to illustrate the article? Continue reading →

She’s No Alexander Hamilton

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner might be behind the times, but has anyone else noticed that it is the Democrats who are playing the role of Alexander Hamilton — the conservative who wanted to centralize government and concentrate power in New York banks — while the Republicans are playing the role of Thomas Jefferson — the civil libertarian who wanted to keep economic and political power decentralized? I always wondered why Lin-Manuel Miranda picked such a conservative historical figure to be the hero of his left-leaning musical.

Now we know. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is going to cost tens of trillions of dollars, but she just blithely says we’ll pay for it “the same way we paid for World War II”: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.”

That’s not how we paid for World War II. Instead, we borrowed money from banks and people that had money. Alexander Hamilton knew just creating a bank doesn’t suddenly give it credit; instead, there has to be assets or income backing up that credit. Continue reading →

The New Transportation Intelligence Test

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has called streetcars an intelligence test: anyone who thinks they are a good idea is not smart enough to make decisions about urban transportation. Now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a new intelligence test, this one dealing with high-speed rail.

Obama’s high-speed rail plan might have replaces 5 percent of American air travel and was projected to cost at least half a trillion dollars. Replacing all air travel would cost much more.

In a description of her Green New Deal released yesterday, Ocasio-Cortez advocates that we “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” This is far more ambitious than Obama’s high-speed rail plan, which was only about 12,000 route miles in five separate, disconnected systems. Continue reading →

“Fundamental Human Right” or Desperate Attempt to Justify More Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
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“We don’t pay for elevators, do we? And rightly so. The very idea is preposterous. Yet the public transit system plays the same role in the city, only sideways,” says James Prince, co-editor of Free Public Transit. Urban transit, Prince argues, is a “fundamental human right and public good.”

No, actually, it isn’t either a human right or a public good. A public good is something from whose benefits no one can be excluded. National defense is the classic example; arguably, storm sewers are a public good as well. But it is easy to exclude people from transit. Continue reading →

Richard Florida: Density Isn’t Affordable

By | | Housing
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The latest to question the urban-planning mantra that densification makes housing more affordable is none other than Richard Florida, who is famous for telling cities they need to attract the creative class. In an article in CityLab, Florida cites new research by MIT planner Yonah Freemark that finds that rezoning neighborhoods for denser housing may actually make housing less affordable.

Antiplanner readers know of the debate between so-called YIMBYs who want to make housing more affordable by “building up” and those who want to “build out,” i.e., build low-density housing on the fringes of existing urban areas. The YIMBYs claim that residents of single-family neighborhoods who resist densification are racists and are keeping housing unaffordable. The Antiplanner responds that dense housing is more expensive and therefore can’t make housing more affordable.

Freemark’s analysis of upzoning in Chicago finds that it leads developers to replace low-cost existing housing with luxury multifamily housing. The result is increased prices. While the laws of supply and demand suggest that an increasing supply of housing would make housing more affordable in the long run, Freemark found that upzoning did not lead to an increase in the number of housing units built; it just influenced where they were built. Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Travels
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Tomorrow, the Antiplanner will fly to Atlanta, the city that spent $23 million to finish a pedestrian bridge in time for the Super Bowl only to have officials declare it a security risk and close it to pedestrians before the game. That’s an appropriate metaphor for a city that spent billions on rail transit but cut back on bus service, resulting in a 66 percent decline in per capita transit ridership.

In any case, on Wednesday Thursday I’ll be speaking about Romance of the Rails twice. First will be a luncheon sponsored by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation beginning at 11:30 am at the Metropolitan Club in Alpharetta. The deadline to register for this event is today.

Second will be an evening event sponsored by the Franklin Roundtable from 7 to 9 pm at 799 Roswell Street, Marietta. No registration is required for this event. If you are in the Atlanta area, I hope to see you at one of these forums.

BRT Doesn’t Stimulate Economic Development

By | | Transportation
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Five years after spending $35 million on a bus-rapid transit line that opened in 2014, Grand Rapids is upset that the line hasn’t generated the economic development that was promised. In a classic case of throwing good money after bad, it is now spending nearly $1 million to prepare a plan that it hopes will remedy this failure.

The notion that bus-rapid transit would generate economic development was promoted by the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, which claims that its HealthLine has stimulated billions in new development since it opened in 2008. Transit officials never mention that much of that development has been heavily subsidized.

The bus route traverses what the city calls the Health-Tech Corridor, which in addition to tax-increment financing offers tax abatements, low-interest loans, various job-creation incentives, and a variety of other subsidies. In all the city has spent at least $100 million in the corridor on top of the bus-rapid transit line. If asked, I imagine the transit agency would say it is only a coincidence that the bus route goes through this corridor. Continue reading →

The Money Pit

By | | Transportation
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Last month, the Department of Transportation announced 2018 “BUILD” grants totaling $1.5 billion. BUILD, which stands for Better Utilizing Investment to Leverage Development, is the successor to TIGER, which stood for Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery. TIGER was a part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and should have ended after the economy had recovered. But Congress had so much fun spending other people’s money that it simply renamed the program and kept it going.

The 2018 BUILD grants include 91 projects in 49 states — only Hawaii got left out — including such things as highway expansions, bus-rapid transit, port facilities, and autonomous vehicle services. Regardless of what they are, virtually all of the projects are local and should have been funded locally and not out of federal deficit spending.

One project the Antiplanner is familiar with is the Coos Bay rail line, which goes west from Eugene, Oregon to Florence, and then south along the Oregon Coast to Coos Bay, then east to Coquille and (at one time) Myrtle Point and Powers. The Myrtle Point/Powers rails have been torn out but the rest of it remains. Continue reading →