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Monthly Archives: August 2019

Yahoo Headline Writers Should Learn to Read

By | | Housing
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A new study finds that some “metro areas have used an urban sprawl to continue to provide ample housing stock for residents” whereas areas that have emphasized dense developments have seen rents reach an all-time high.

Yahoo! News headlined its report on this study, “How affordable housing in big cities is hurt by urban sprawl.” Yet neither the article nor the study explains how urban sprawl in affordable metro areas makes housing in dense metro areas less affordable.

“It seems that the metros most effectively meeting the demand for new housing are still primarily doing so by continuing to sprawl,” says the study, “despite an increasing demand for dense, walkable neighborhoods that prioritize sustainability.” This was supposed to have been written by an economist, but wouldn’t an economist question whether demand for dense neighborhoods is really increasing if builders, whose livelihoods depend on keep up with demand, aren’t building them in less-regulated areas? Continue reading →

14. Three Tools

By | | Iconoclast
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In the late 1970s, I wrote comments on enough draft plans for people in the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service to know who I was, but not enough to have a major impact on the plans. But I found or developed three tools that helped.

The first was described in a book titled The Economics of Natural Environments by John Krutilla, of Resources for the Future, and Anthony Fisher, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley. The book argued that, since development of a roadless area was irreversible, a special calculation was necessary to weigh the benefits and costs of such development. Their proposal was to assume that the recreation and other amenity values of undeveloped areas would increase forever because such areas would become increasingly scarce. Even if today’s amenity values didn’t outweigh today’s commodity values from development, they argued, the discounted sum of future amenity values might do so.

I applied Krutilla and Fisher’s method to Oregon roadless areas in a paper called An Economic View of RARE II. The paper showed that, while some areas had tremendous timber values that outweighed potential wilderness values, most were more valuable for amenities than commodities. Continue reading →

Can’t Take the Heat? Attack Your Opponents

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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What do you do if you are an associate professor of law looking to bolster your resume by writing papers that make bold assertions and someone challenges you on those assertions? If you are Greg Shill, you call them names.

Shill, as noted here before, has written articles claiming that Americans didn’t choose to drive; they were “forced” to do so by the law. The Antiplanner responded to that, and Shill’s reply was to call me a “climate denier.” When asked to respond to my article point by point, Shill said, “There’s no point arguing with climate deniers (or anti-vaxxers, for that matter).”

I thought the question was whether the law forced people to drive, not climate. For what it’s worth, far from being a “climate denier,” whatever that is, I am not a climatologist and so I’ve never expressed a strong opinion on the issue of climate change. Apparently, Shill has no qualms about expressing opinions on subjects outside his area of expertise (which is business law). Continue reading →