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Monthly Archives: March 2019

Killing the California Dream

By | | Housing
2 Comments

Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City,” writes LA Times columnist George Skelton (reprinted in the Mercury-News and East Bay Times in case you run into the LA Times paywall). After reading his article, the Antiplanner has just one question: Why?

Skelton argues that California’s population has grown in the last 70 years and is still growing. But he doesn’t seem to realize that the vast majority of the state is still rural. The 2010 census found that urban areas covering just 5.3 percent of the state is urban and houses 95 percent of the state’s population.

In 2000, California conducted a housing supply study titled Raising the Roof. The full text of the study is no longer available on the California housing department’s web site, so I’ve posted it here. Chapter 3 assesses how much land in each county is available for development, data summarized in exhibit 13 (previously cited here). Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library:
Cities Without Planners

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
7 Comments

Alain Bertaud (previously) is an urban planner who never met an urban economist until almost a decade after graduating from planning school. The economist opened his eyes: not only did urban economics often teach exactly the opposite of what planning schools taught, the economists based their conclusions on data, models, and real world experience, while the planners based their ideas on intuition and the general beliefs of previous generations of planners.

Bertaud’s new book, Order without Design, reflects a lifetime of growing skepticism about urban planning dogma. Planners, says Bertaud, based their ideas on rules of thumb that were developed by people who often know nothing about the people they are regulating or planning for. Continue reading →

Affordable Housing at $530 Per Square Foot

By | | Housing
4 Comments

Last year, Portland’s Metro persuaded voters to raise their property taxes (which will make housing less affordable) so Metro could sell $652.8 million worth of bonds that could be applied to so-called affordable housing projects. The first such project will be the Mary Ann, a four-story apartment in Beaverton.

The apartments will actually be built by Reach Community Development, a non-profit housing group that is using low-income tax credits to pay nearly 55 percent of the $20.9 million cost. Metro will provide another $3 million, so Reach only has to recover $6.5 million from rents or sales in the building. Continue reading →

Where Are Millennials Moving?

By | | Regional planning
3 Comments

Meyers Research, which studies housing markets, asked Millennials where they wanted to move to. Their top five choices were Denver, Portland, Seattle, Washington, DC, and New York City.

By any measure, Millennials and other Americans are mainly moving to sprawling areas such as Dallas and Houston, which are both affordable and full of job opportunities. Photo by Carol Highsmith.

Then Meyers asked where should Millennials want to live, based on the factors millennials said were most important: job opportunities, affordability, and lifestyle. The answers were Dallas, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, and Orlando. Although Denver and Seattle were both in the top ten, neither of the top-five lists had any cities in common. Continue reading →

Learning the Right Lessons

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

For the third time, Gwinnett County voters rejected a plan to raise their taxes in order to expand the metropolitan Atlanta rail system into their county. Only three of the five main counties in the Atlanta urban area are part of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), and transit advocates have long blamed any MARTA failures on the reluctance of the other counties to join.

Thou shall not pass into Gwinnett County. Photo by RTABus.

Some implied that anyone who voted against MARTA expansion into Gwinnett County was racist. But it’s not racist to object to spending billions of dollars on an obsolete technology to serve a dying industry. Continue reading →

NY-NJ Should Put Up or Shut Up

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is upset that the Trump administration doesn’t want to fund new tunnels under the Hudson River. Cuomo sent an angry letter to Trump earlier this week accusing the president of being prejudiced against New York and New Jersey because they didn’t vote for him. Cuomo claims the tunnels should be federally funded because “the Northeast is home to 17 percent of the entire population and contributes 20 percent to the national domestic product.”

But population and regional populations aren’t among the criteria Congress established for federal funding of transit infrastructure. Instead, one of the most important criteria that the Department of Transportation is required to use is whether the project is “supported by an acceptable degree of local financial commitment.” Based on the lack of local support, the Federal Transit Administration’s 2020 New Starts funding recommendations gave the project a “medium-low” rating, and under federal law, that makes it ineligible for funding. Not counting some small starts (such as the downtown Los Angeles streetcar), the only other project to get a medium-low rating was the Portal North Bridge, which is also part of the Hudson Gateway megaproject.

Cuomo argues that Trump has ignored “the financial commitments made by New York and New Jersey.” The FTA’s profile of the project reveals just what those commitments are. Continue reading →

Is This Infrastructure Really Necessary?

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The United States has “at least $232 billion in critical public transportation” needs, claims the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). Among the “critically needed” infrastructure on APTA’s list are a streetcar in downtown Los Angeles, another one in downtown Sacramento (which local voters have rejected), one in Tempe, and streetcar extensions in Tampa and Kansas City.

Get real: even ardent transit advocates admit that streetcars are stupid. The economic development benefits that supposedly come from streetcars are purely imaginary, and even if they weren’t, it would be hard to describe streetcars — whose average speed, APTA admits, is less than 7.5 miles per hour — as “critically needed.”

Much of the nation’s transit infrastructure is falling apart, and the Department of Transportation has identified $100 billion of infrastructure backlog needs. (Page l — that is, Roman numeral 50 — of the report indicates a backlog of $89.9 billion in 2012 dollars. Converting to 2019 dollars brings this up to $100 billion.) Yet APTA’s “critical needs” list includes only $24 billion worth of “state of good repair” projects. Just about all of the other “needs” listed — $142 billion worth — are new projects or extensions of existing projects. Continue reading →

Infill Won’t Make Housing Affordable

By | | Housing
3 Comments

The Portland Planning Commission has approved a plan to rezone almost all of the city’s single-family neighborhoods to quadruple the current densities. Planners claimed that this would make housing more affordable by allowing the construction of tens of thousands of new triplexes or fourplexes in the next few years.

Internal documents, however reveal that the planners’ own projections are that this change will lead to fewer than 4,000 new housing units. Moreover, most of those units will be in poor neighborhoods, resulting in the displacement of low-income families by people who can afford to live in new, higher-cost housing.

Fourplexes won’t solve housing affordability problems because Portland’s urban-growth boundary makes land prices high. Quadrupling densities won’t help if the land itself costs four times as much as in urban areas that don’t have growth boundaries. Continue reading →

Another Streetcar SNAFU

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

El Paso’s transit agency, Sun Metro, opened 4.8 miles of streetcar lines last November, attracting 37,000 riders in November and 32,000 in December. Then it started charging fares, and ridership fell to 14,000 in January and 9,000 in February.

El Paso’s streetcar rust in the desert, tempting nostalgia buffs to seek government subsidies for restoration. Flickr photo from Visit El Paso.

In 1974, El Paso became the last city in the United States to replace its streetcar lines with buses. Its last line connected the city with Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, and it only kept running streetcars on the route because the Customs Service said it was easier to deal with border crossings on streetcars than on buses. Continue reading →

Transit’s Declining Importance

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
7 Comments

The steady decline in transit ridership, combined with the growth of driving, is revealed in passenger-mile data published by the Department of Transportation. The table below shows changes in transit’s share of motorized travel for the nation’s 25 largest urban areas. Outside of these areas, transit’s share declined by more than 10 percent in Sacramento, San Jose, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Charlotte, among many others.

Urbanized Area20162017Change
New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT11.6%11.5%-1.0%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA1.9%1.8%-4.7%
Chicago, IL-IN3.6%3.4%-5.5%
Miami, FL1.1%1.1%-2.5%
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD2.8%2.4%-11.2%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX0.6%0.5%-4.9%
Houston, TX0.7%0.7%-2.0%
Washington, DC-VA-MD3.5%3.2%-9.3%
Atlanta, GA0.9%0.9%-6.7%
Boston, MA-NH-RI2.9%2.7%-6.5%
Detroit, MI0.4%0.4%-0.7%
Phoenix-Mesa, AZ0.6%0.7%14.3%
San Francisco-Oakland, CA7.1%6.6%-7.0%
Seattle, WA3.4%3.4%1.2%
San Diego, CA1.4%1.3%-7.1%
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI1.1%1.1%-1.7%
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL0.4%0.3%-12.9%
Denver-Aurora, CO1.7%1.6%-1.4%
Baltimore, MD2.3%2.3%-2.0%
St. Louis, MO-IL0.7%0.6%-10.3%
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA0.5%0.4%-8.2%
Las Vegas-Henderson, NV1.0%0.9%-3.0%
Portland, OR-WA2.3%2.3%-0.1%
Cleveland, OH0.8%0.7%-11.7%
San Antonio, TX0.7%0.6%-3.7%

Continue reading →