Monthly Archives: January 2020

Sales of the Vanishing Automobile went really well. Although my publicity was limited to a web site and speaking engagements, it sold faster than my previous book, Reforming the Forest Service.

This made me realize that there was a lot of grassroots opposition to urban planning fads such as smart growth and light rail. To promote that opposition, I decided to bring experts and activists together in a national conference.

Previous conferences that I had held, such as the 1984 Mission Symposium, had been backed up by a staff of at least four or five other people. But I organized this conference, which I called Preserving the American Dream, by myself. Continue reading →

While I was in transition from working primarily on public lands issues to working primarily on urban issues, the Forest Service was in transition from focusing primarily on timber to focusing on something else, but it wasn’t quite sure what. Chief Thomas suggested that it should focus on ecosystem management, but ecosystem management doesn’t pay the bills, especially since no one was quite sure what it meant.

My reform proposals called for the federal land agencies to be allowed to charge market prices for all resources and be funded exclusively out of a fixed share of those revenues. I suspected that, on most national forests, this would lead to recreation becoming the most important use, though there would still be room for timber and other uses. The main obstacle to this was that Congress didn’t allow the agencies to charge for most recreation.

That began to change in 1996 when Congress created the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, allowing each of the four main public land agencies (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service) to begin up to 100 experiments with recreation fees each and letting the agencies keep the revenues. The Park Service approached this with a complete lack of innovation, instead merely increasing entrance fees on 100 parks that were already charging fees and keeping the increased income (the fees that were previously being collected went into the Land & Water Conservation Fund). Continue reading →

I first met Randy Simmons when we were both graduate students at the University of Oregon. He was seeking a Ph.D. in political science, but like me when I was in urban planning, he decided to get a different view of things by taking a course in urban economics. I was in my first term as a student in economics and they assigned me to be a teaching assistant in the course he was taking.

I had already taken urban economics, but the course I took was for graduate students and the course he was taken was for undergraduates and included a lot more basic economics while the graduate course focused on modeling. As a result, I was a terrible T.A. because I didn’t yet know much about basic economic concepts such as elasticity. Yet Randy and I got along because we were both interested in environmental issues.

By 2000, Randy was the chair of the Utah State University political science department. He had studied and written about public lands, endangered species, and wilderness (and since then has written much more). But he really thinks more like an economist than a political scientist, and today he is in Utah State’s economics department. Continue reading →

Between the end of fall semester at Yale and the beginning of spring semester at UC Berkeley, we had time to drive across the United States, spend a few days at our Oak Grove home that was still for sale, find housing in the Bay Area, take a trip to the Oregon Coast, and move the things we needed from Oregon to our temporary home in Walnut Creek. I had looked for housing in Berkeley and quickly decided that housing on the other side of the Berkeley Hills in Contra Costa County was more affordable. I lucked out in finding a serviceable home that was scheduled to be torn down and replaced with apartments, so the owners rented it for a reasonable price.

This meant that, for the first time since high school, I commuted by transit instead of by bicycle or foot. From the house in Walnut Creek, I walked a short distance to the BART station and took the train to Berkeley. With a change of trains, I could get off within two blocks of my office. If I took my bicycle, which was allowed during non-rush-hours, I could avoid the change of trains and cycle about two miles to the office.

On the walk to the BART station I passed through a neighborhood of pre-war homes that realtors would describe as cute or cozy. Most were about 1,000 to 1,600 square feet on small, irregularly shaped lots. A few for-sale signs indicated asking prices of around $400,000, which seemed astounding for someone used to Oregon’s prices. However, I learned, that was only the starting price, as the homes sold rapidly after bidding wars that could easily add $100,000 to the price. This was the result of the urban-growth boundaries in Contra Costa and all other Bay Area counties (except San Francisco, which was entirely urbanized). Continue reading →