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Monthly Archives: October 2019

Home Prices Rise Higher in Restricted Areas

By | | Policy brief
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For the first time since the financial crash, the median U.S. home price crept up above three times median family incomes in 2018, according to the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS). Places with price-to-income ratios under 3 are affordable (meaning people can easily pay off a mortgage on a house that is three times their income); price-to-income ratios between 3 and 4 are marginally affordable; price-to-income ratios between 4 and 5 are unaffordable; and price-to-income ratios above 5 are extremely unaffordable.


Click image to download a PDF of this four-page policy brief.

The U.S. price-to-income ratio is barely in the “marginal” class, as it is under 3.007. But it has reached this level because several states continue to allow their anti-sprawl policies to push housing prices up in the unaffordable or extremely unaffordable categories. Rather than fix the problem, planners are attempting to blame expensive housing on single-family homeowners who don’t want to see multifamily housing built in their neighborhoods. Continue reading →

23. The End of Forest Planning

By | | Iconoclast
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By the late 1980s, forest planning was far from complete. As of 1987, eight years after the Forest Service published its final planning rules, more than half the plans were still unfinished. Still, the process was winding down, as reflected by the number of forest plan reviews I did each year. As near as I can tell, I had reviewed some 20 plans in 1985, but only eight each in 1986 and 1987, seven in 1988, and one a year for the next couple of years after that.

After considering appeals and do-overs resulting from those appeals, the planning process was taking a lot longer than originally projected. The plans were also a lot more expensive. Though Chief McGuire had guessed in 1976 that each plan would cost about a million dollars, Northern Arizona University forestry professor Richard Behan estimated that the actual cost was well over $10 million per plan.

One of the plans I reviewed in 1987 was for Ohio’s Wayne National Forest. Since the Wayne and the Hoosier were both only about a hundred thousand acres each, compared to western forests that were typically close to a million acres, both the Indiana and Ohio forests were managed out of the same supervisor’s office in Bedford, Indiana.

Continue reading →

2018 Census Data Show Transit in Decline

By | | Policy brief
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The Census Bureau released data from the 2018 American Community Survey last week, and the big news is its finding that income inequality has worsened. America’s transit agencies contributed to that problem as they continue to build expensive transit systems into wealthy suburbs while they cut service to low-income neighborhoods.

Click image to download a PDF of this four-page policy brief.

As a result, people who earned less than $25,000 a year were 6 percent less likely to commute to work by transit in 2018 than people in the same income class in 2010, while people who earned $65,000 a year or more were 7 percent more likely to commute by transit. Moreover, the median income of transit commuters rose above the median income of people who commute in single-occupancy automobiles for the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping track of this information in 1960. Continue reading →