Search Results for: plan bay area

Killing the California Dream

By | | Housing
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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 →

Transit’s Declining Importance

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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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 →

2018 Transit Ridership Down 2.0 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in 2018 was 2.0 percent less than in 2017, according to the December 2018 monthly data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Led by a 2.5 percent decline in heavy-rail ridership, total rail ridership actually declined by more than bus ridership: 2.1 percent vs. 2.0 percent.

The 2018 decline follows three straight years of previous losses, resulting in a total 8.5 percent fall since 2014. Between 2017 and 2018, ridership declined in 35 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, and since 2014 it declined in all but four: Houston, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Raleigh.

In November’s ridership report, the Antiplanner noted that commuter-rail numbers for Boston, New York, and a few other cities appeared to be incomplete, resulting in an apparent 15 percent decline in total commuter-rail ridership from November 2017. The December release corrects those data, revealing that total commuter-rail ridership in November didn’t fall at all, but it didn’t really increase either, gaining less than 0.05 percent. Commuter rail fell by 0.2 percent in December and was flat for the year as a whole. Continue reading →

What If We Free San Francisco?

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Urban areas
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Someone recently alerted me to a 2017 article in Forbes in which my friend Scott Beyer, who considers himself a market urbanist, asks, “How would San Francisco develop under an open market?” His incorrect answer is that it would be even denser than today.

He bases that on the fact that in parts of the Bay Area where housing prices are highest, population growth is low. The latter, he says, is due to NIMBYism preventing construction of new housing. Get rid of NIMBYism (by getting rid of zoning), and new housing would spring up denser than ever before.

Beyers is correct that NIMBYism is a real problem. But it is not the main reason why Bay Area housing is expensive. As Bay Area developer Nicolas Arenson pointed out in a presentation to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in May, 2015, high-density housing costs more to build per square foot than low-density housing — up to 650 percent more depending on the density. Land also costs more in areas that are already developed. As if that’s not enough, Arenson adds that dense housing “sells at a discount” to single-family homes. Continue reading →

Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Continue reading →

Don’t Be Like [Insert City Name Here]

By | | City planning, Regional planning
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Emily Badger, who is fast becoming the Antiplanner’s favorite writer at the New York Times, has an article this week about how cities are trying not to be like certain other cities. Seattle doesn’t want to be like San Francisco; San Francisco doesn’t want to be like Manhattan. Kansas City doesn’t want to be like Denver.

“You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted),” says Badger. Too bad she had to spoil it by including Houston, which (as she pointed out in a previous article) many people think is the model other big cities should follow.

Part of the problem is that people just don’t like big cities. The same Gallup poll that found that more Americans of all age groups would rather live in rural areas than big cities also found that more Americans of all age classes would rather live in a suburb of a big city than in a big city itself, and that more Americans of all age classes except 18-29 year olds would rather live in a small town than a big city (and among 18-29 year olds the difference was only 1 percent). People dislike big cities because they tend to be more congested, impersonal, and crime-ridden than small cities or suburbs. Continue reading →

VTA Faces $25 Million Deficit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which the Antiplanner has sometimes called the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, is facing a $25 million deficit next year, which will probably lead to service cuts. As the Friends of Caltrain (the commuter rail line that connects San Jose to San Francisco) note, the elephant in the room is whether VTA should go forward with its plans for billions of dollars of capital projects when it can’t afford to run the system it already has.

Friends of Caltrain doesn’t specifically say so, but the real elephant is VTA’s plans to extend the BART line to downtown San Jose. VTA is “97 percent complete” building a 10-mile line from Fremont to Berryessa (a neighborhood in north San Jose). This line, which is costing $2.3 billion, was supposed to be open at the beginning of 2018, but thanks in part to a scandal over a contractor’s use of used parts in construction, the opening has been delayed until late 2019. (An update from Friends of Caltrain says the VTA board was willing to look at capital projects, but still did not specifically mention BART.)

Extending the line another 6.5 miles to downtown San Jose is expected to cost another $4.7 billion, or more than $720 a mile, mainly because much of it will be underground. VTA expects to ask the Federal Transit Administration to cover $1.5 billion of this amount, leaving local taxpayers to cover the rest. If this project is ever completed, BART riders arriving in downtown San Jose are likely to find a stripped-down transit system that probably won’t take them where they want to go if it is more than a couple of blocks from the BART station. Continue reading →

How to Sell Forced Densification to Libertarians

By | | Housing
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When cities pass zoning rules (as Missoula, Portland, and many Portland suburbs have done) mandating minimum-density zoning — so that people are forced to either build high-density housing in existing low-density neighborhoods or build nothing at all — libertarians lead the charge against such rules. But urban planners have managed to achieve the same result, and gain the support of some who consider themselves libertarian, by:

  1. Drawing an urban-growth boundary or passing similar policies forbidding development outside the existing urban footprint;
  2. Waiting a few years for the resulting supply shorting to push up housing prices;
  3. Blaming high housing prices on residents of single-family neighborhoods who object to densification of their neighborhoods;
  4. Proposing a law or ordinance that effectively eliminates zoning in those single-family neighborhoods.

Thus, we have a writer for Reason magazine supporting a law that would eliminate much of the zoning in San Francisco and other unaffordable California cities. Another Reason writer endorses a new zoning ordinance in Minneapolis that allows multifamily housing in single-family neighborhoods. The Mercatus Center blames high housing prices on single-family zoning as does a report from the Cato Institute. Continue reading →

California Romance Forums

By | | Housekeeping
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On Monday the Antiplanner announced a road trip to publicize Romance of the Rails, but didn’t have details for next weeks forums in California. Here they are.

Monday, November 19: 7:00 pm (registration begins at 6:15), Black Bear Diner, 415 E. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale. Sponsored by the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association. Click here for more information and to preregister; $25 charge for members of SVTA, $35 for non-members, includes dinner and a beverage.

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If you are in the Bay Area or Sacramento, I hope to see you at one of these events.

Transit Lies & Deceptions

By | | Transportation
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Recent panels with the Antiplanner and several transit advocates exposed some disagreements that are legitimately difficult to prove one way or the other. For example, Jarrett Walker thinks that there is a pent-up demand for dense urban living and I don’t, but government regulation has so screwed up housing markets that it is hard to prove who is correct.

These photos are a lie. (Click image for a larger view.)

At the same time, the transit advocates made some claims that are easy to prove wrong. For example, one said that a two-track rail line can move as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway. Another used the above photos to show that a bus uses far less space to move people than cars. Both of these claims are highly deceptive. Continue reading →