The Antiplanner tends to agree with Dilbert that New Year’s is a random calendar date, but everyone else is looking back at 2018, probably because it provides a good excuse for a blog post. From my point of view, the two most important events of 2018 were the continuing decline of transit ridership and urban planners’ latest victory in their battles against single-family homes.
November ridership data will be out in a few days, and December a month after that, but October data show that year-over-year ridership fell in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York subways were recovering from major delays due to repairs in July 2017. Over the last decade, annual ridership in some urban areas has fallen by nearly 50 percent, and it has fallen by more than 15 percent in more than half of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas.
While some of the decline is due to increasingly unreliable rail systems in New York, Washington, and a few other cities, most of it is due to factors beyond transit agency control: the growth of ride hailing, the growth of other alternatives such as electric scooters, and the growing affordability of driving as oil prices remain low. The question isn’t whether transit will recover; it is whether it will be able to survive at all, especially outside of New York City and the six other cities (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington) where transit still makes a difference in the day-to-day life of the average resident.
If the Antiplanner appears to be giddy about transit’s downfall, it’s because I am. To me, the transit industry has perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever, siphoning more than one-and-a-half trillion inflation-adjusted dollars out of taxpayer’s wallets since 1964 and depositing it into the treasuries of some of the most inefficient, poorly managed government agencies ever and into the hands of contractors who are willing to divert a share into industry propaganda campaigns. In many places, these campaigns have persuaded voters that spending more on transit is a good thing, but the continuing decline in ridership should teach people that this isn’t true.
If I feel like the good guys are winning the transit debate, the same is hardly true for the housing debate. For the past two decades, I’ve warned that urban planners have been making war on the single-family home. It’s an irrational war as their main complaint is that it takes up too much land, yet land is one of the most abundant resources in the United States. Through urban-growth boundaries and other tools, planners have created artificial scarcities of land and driven up housing prices in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Northeastern states from Massachusetts to northern Virginia.
In 2018, planners deftly diverted attention from their flawed growth-management tools by claiming that single-family zoning is the cause of high housing prices. Minneapolis was the first city to fall for this nonsense, voting to abolish single-family zoning last month. Leaders in the Oregon legislature are proposing to do the same statewide in 2019.
The reality is that single-family zoning isn’t the cause of high housing prices. As I’ve noted before, every major city in America except Houston has single-family zoning (and Houston’s covenants accomplish the same result), yet housing is unaffordable only in places that practice rural growth management.
Nor will building higher densities make housing affordable. In October, the Antiplanner noted a recent report that claimed that the cost per square foot of high-density housing was as much as seven times the cost of single-family homes. However, the source of that information was unclear.
Since then, I’ve obtained the source, a Powerpoint presentation providing developers’ perspectives on Plan Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area plan that called for making housing more affordable by building denser housing. Pages 18 and 19 provide some hard numbers about costs per square foot.
Using five homes per acre as the standard for single-family homes, developer Nicholas Arenson stated that the cost per square foot of housing at 15 units per acre was 1.3 times the standard; 20 units per acre was 1.5 times; 50 units per acre was 3 to 4 times; and 100 units per acre was 5.5 to 7.5 times that of single-family homes. He also indicated that higher-density housing “sells at a discount” to single-family homes.
Arenson’s numbers come from the San Francisco Bay Area and the details may vary elsewhere. But it appears indisputable that we can’t rely on higher-density housing to make housing more affordable because such housing is economically feasible only if housing remains very expensive.
If it takes a huge decline in ridership for people to see that transit isn’t working, what will it take for people to see that density isn’t the solution to housing affordability problems? The effect of Minneapolis’ new zoning code on housing prices won’t be known for years, if ever. However, the effect of that code on the livability of the city may come sooner. So far, planners have attempted to silence defenders of single-family neighborhoods by calling them racists, but that argument may not last long, especially when minority neighborhoods are among those targeted for densification.
So there is hope for 2019 in both the transportation and land-use fields. I appreciate your comments on the Antiplanner’s blog posts and I look forward to continuing discussions about these issues in the coming year.
Giddy? MOre like whipping out the pom poms and skirt
GIMME A D-E-C-L-I-N-E
WHAT’S THAT SPELL!?
Uber and Lyft will fail to make anywhere near what they expect in their IPOs. If Uber had any sense, while losing $1 billion+ per quarter, they’d start shutting down the company now so the blow isn’t so hard to their employees when the VC funding finally runs out.
AVs will fail to make any headway. To paraphrase a nntaleb-ism, only Ideologues Yet Idiots (IYIs) still believe that AVs will amount to anything, or are religious fanatics like Kurzweil or Brad Templeton (one of the earliest AV “evangelists” (sic). The same sort of technological co-religionists also believe in flying cars and electric airplanes, despite the fact that the battery to liquid fuel weight ratio is still something like 40 to 1, even with lithium ion batteries.
Most of the decline in BUS ridership is due to service cuts. Ridesharing is a minor factor except in dense cities like San Francisco.
Economic rationality and starting to make a dent in reducing greenhouse gas emissions dictates a major increase in the cost of driving, e.g., making drivers pay for their use of automobile terminal facilities, much as transit always does for ITS terminals, as well as congestion pricing to stabilize travel times AND develop alternatives.
Finally, to be believable, The Antiplanner needs to get SIMPLE facts straight. TexRail is starting with 60-minute service because that is what they have available, 5 units with 3 units in service. The remaining 3 trainsets have not yet arrived.
BTW, Metrosucks and Frank, and other auto co-religionists. Please step in front of a speeding AV in Chandler.
“Nor will building higher densities make housing affordable”. If we built smaller homes it would be……….
Housing is more expensive than ever before; WHY?, Nevermind the average home size has doubled in the last 30 years…might have something to do with that even though family member size has not.
As we enter a new age of pragmatism, the goodies that were once deal-closers are backfiring. Fully loaded homes with shit we only use once/twice a month are unsellable now that buyers can’t afford houses built around their hobbies. They’re no longer treating home as an ephemeral commodity to be swapped out with each life change or crisis. Instead, many homeowners are finding that what they really want are flexible dwellings that can expand and contract with them as their physical, relational, and financial circumstance.
Houses got too big because people were chasing investment gains rather than building family friendly and economical dwellings. I’m not raving for saying the density of cities but smaller, closer knit community homes. Something perhaps along the line with Frank Lloyd Wrights Usonian dwellings designed during the depression; housing for the working man and expanding family. Which became the model for the tract homes in Levittown. In an obliterated real estate market the McMansion cul-de-sacs will collapse because start up families don’t want them. One of the largest social engineering experiments in the last 30 years has been the McMansion. The mortgage tax deduction encouraged a HUGE expansion of homeownership (which would not a be a problem if the houses were smaller and economical). While Fannie and Freddie created new pools of capital thru securities, the federal government kept building more highways to distant suburbs where local governments often mandated large homes and large lots believing it would create affluent (and tax revenue gaining) communities. The result was NOT THAT. The per capita earnings of these new residents made tax revenues fall short of anticipated to pay for the infrastructure the communities needed. Facing widespread revolts against property taxes, many municipalities began financing their infrastructure through impact fees levied at the builders which was passed on to the buyers. But the buyers bought into this charade with the promise of more space. Combine the crash of the dot com bubble, the post 2000 recession, the banks being forced to make loans to unqualified people and the construction of a single type of housing that was resource and energy intensive………..the Housing collapse was inevitable.
A 25% reduction in floor plan size would result in a near 50% reduction in house volume. Volume which increases by a factor of 30-60% for every 100-200 sq ft increase in floor area, that volume adds to the higher energy cost to heat and cool. When realtors advertise 9-10 foot ceilings they’re scamming you…besides cleaning high ceilings; An increase in ceiling height increases the useless amount of air volume you have to heat and cool. A decrease in ceiling height by one foot decreases your air volume by 1000-2000 cubic feet. It takes 19 BTU’s of energy to increase the temperature of 1000 cubic feet of air one degree Fahrenheit. It takes 2-3 times that much energy to decrease the temperature (Via air conditioning) one degree Fahrenheit. The average home size in the US is now 2,600 square feet of floor space. With a ceiling height of 9 feet that’s over 23,000 cubic feet of interior volume. A McMansion with 9 foot ceilings, needs several thousands BTU’s of energy per day to climate control and you only reside for about half to 2/3rds the day if you’re working or out somewhere. A floor plan decrease by 25% eliminates nearly 6,000 cubic feet of volume you’d have to cool down or heat up and a ceiling reduction of just one foot eliminates nearly 8,000 cubic feet of volume. And these houses weren’t built to be efficient.
Too bad msetty can’t take his own advice. But then, he’d have to stop beating it to goat porn in his sister’s bathroom up in Napa Valley, and actually drive the 60 miles or so it would take to find an AV. You see, msetty is too pathetic to afford the glorious privilege of living in a 500sf rat-hole and taking transit everywhere; you know, the way he thinks the rest of us should live. That, or he’s just like every other planner and land use soviet official, and is a selfish, hypocritical SOB who thinks the rules shouldn’t apply to him. Either way, you can tell he’s lashing out because he’s scared and angry, and that’s a good sign. That means that he, and his ilk, are losing. Hallelujah!
Economic rationality and starting to make a dent in reducing greenhouse gas emissions dictates a major increase in the cost of driving…
In their hearts, government employees long to be dictators.
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Attributed to George Washington
LazyReader says, “‘Nor will building higher densities make housing affordable’. If we built smaller homes it would be.” But smaller single-family homes are more affordable than smaller multifamily. So the size is irrelevant.
The real point is that planners are saying, “You can’t afford a 2,000-square-foot single-family home? Not to worry: here’s a 600-square-foot apartment for you.” The reality is that a 2,000-square-foot home in someplace like Dallas or Houston is less expensive than a 600-square-foot apartment in San Francisco.
Yet Metrosucks, your infrastructure is protected by the government.
“Highways are there regardless of economic conditions” -Randal O’Toole
Capitalism is a myth.
So it doesn’t really mean much by calling Mr.Setty a hypocrite :$
There wouldn’t be any economy without highways or roads, you worthless imbecile. The economy can get by just fine without overpriced toy trains built for the sole purpose of giving you masturbation material.
There would still be economic activity even with out your autoerotica mobiles. I’ve never said that there shouldn’t be streets, I’m against crooked contractors.
Government policy is anti-rail, roads are not expected to be profitable to survive :$
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/photos/lamoille-valley-rail-trail