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The Dishonorable Nevada Land-Grab Act

By | | Public lands
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The federal government owns so much of Nevada–nearly 85 percent–that it has put a crimp in the state’s economy. The Antiplanner has designated it, along with Alaska, a remnant of the “Old Feudalism” in which the government or a few private parties own so much land that it is hard for individual residents to own land and conduct business.

Still, there is something wrong with a bill proposed in Congress with the peculiar title of Honor the Nevada Enabling Act of 1864 Act. The bill’s premise is that Congress failed to convey to Nevada lands that it gave to 38 other states at statehood, so Congress should immediately give the state 7.2 million acres of its choosing, with more acres to be given to the state later.

This is historically inaccurate. Only 30 states, including Nevada, received federal lands on statehood, not 38 as claimed by proponents of the so-called Honor bill. Nevada was made a state in 1864, and was among those states created between 1849 and 1896 that were offered two square miles of land out of every 36 square miles in the state–that is, sections 16 and 36 out of every township.* That would have been 3.9 million acres in Nevada. These lands were to be used to help fund schools.

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Happy Birthday, Jane Jacobs

By | | City planning, News commentary
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As noted in today’s Google doodle, today is Jane Jacob’s 100th birthday. No doubt many people will write positive things about her. However, as the Antiplanner has noted before, her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is overrated.

Jacobs made two points, one of them right, and one of them wrong. Her correct point, which is celebrated by many libertarians, is in recognizing that urban planners don’t understand the cities they claim to be designing. The hubris of planners writing 50 year plans when they don’t even know what’s going to happen five years from now would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so expensive.

Jacobs wrong point, which is celebrated by many urban planners today, was in thinking that she did understand cities. She thought she understood her neighborhood, Greenwich Village, New York, but she didn’t understand it very well. She reduced her understanding to four simple “conditions” that she said all cities needed: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and density of residents and jobs. Her application of these oversimplified conditions to all “great cities” made her just as guilty of hubris as the planners she criticized.

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Antiplanner’s Library: Who Owns the World

By | | Book reviews, Follow up
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While doing research for my map of the New Feudalism, I found this 2010 book by Irish journalist Kevin Cahill. Despite the shrill cover rhetoric, the book is basically a nation-by-nation (and, in the United States, state-by-state) inventory of land ownership patterns. There are a lot of question marks about some countries, but it helps to fill in some of the blanks in Eastern Europe on my map.

Click image to find booksellers offering this book through abebooks.com.

Cahill’s thesis is that “the main cause of most remaining poverty in the world is an excess of landownership in too few hands.” The book is a follow-up to Cahill’s 2002 book, Who Owns Britain? Cahill makes much of Britain’s claim that the crown is the ultimate owner of all the land in the United Kingdom, and goes further and claims the Queen owns all of the land in Canada, Australia, and two-thirds of Antarctica. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of families in Australia, Britain, and Canada have fee-simple title to their land, which is just as valid as the titles Americans have to the land they own.

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APTA Tinkers with the Deck Chairs

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Your largest member has just quit, complaining that your organization doesn’t do enough to help it and other large members and that they are underrepresented on your organization’s executive committee. And, oh, by the way, you’re paying your chief executive officer too much.

So what do you do? If you are the American Public Transportation Association, you fire the CEO. That’s not really going to solve any problems, but after 4-1/2 years of getting paid nearly $900,000 per year (see page 17), he probably has enough to retire on. There’s no word yet on whether his replacement will get a similar salary.

A salary and benefits of close to a million dollars a year might make sense for a company that earns billions of dollars in annual revenues. It makes a little less sense for APTA, which uses its $20 million in annual revenues to lobby Congress to get billions of federal dollars funneled to its members. It makes even less sense since the federal funds going to APTA members did not significantly increase during the reign of the newly retired CEO, part of whose qualifications are that he once drove the bus for the Indiana University basketball team coached by Bobby Knight. It is particularly galling to outsiders since taxpayers are the ultimate source of the funds used to pay him.

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Hillsborough County Commissioners Vote No

By | | Transportation
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Tampa-area voters will be spared the expense of having to go through another campaign to build an obsolete transit system in the city thanks to a 3-to-2 vote against the project by Hillsborough County commissioners. Voters already rejected the light-rail project once in 2010, and voters in neighboring Pinellas County voted against a connecting rail project in 2014.

In the end, it was a close thing. The swing vote on the county commission, Victor Crist, said he made his decision during a three-hour public hearing at which half the witnesses favored the project and half opposed. But to get a realistic look at the reality of urban rail transit, Crist and his fellow commissioners need only look at their neighbor to the south, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

As the Antiplanner noted the other day, Puerto Rico is $70 billion in debt, and one of those billions is for the Tren Urbano, a rail system that opened in 2004. Not only are local residents having to repay that $1 billion, they have to spend nearly $50 million per year to keep it operating, partly because ridership is less than half of what was projected.

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Why the Dollar Works and the Euro Doesn’t

By | | News commentary
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The Greek debt crisis led some people to wonder why a common currency works in the United States but not in Europe. Then came the Puerto Rico debt crisis. Yet what happened in Puerto Rico actually shows why the dollar works when the euro doesn’t.

Normally, a country that finds itself with unsustainable debt can devalue its currency. This reduces the standard of living for the country’s residents but makes it easier for the government to pay off whatever debt it owes in the local currency.

Neither Greece nor Puerto Rico have that option since their currency is shared with other nations or states. As a member of the euro zone, Greece can threaten to leave, destabilizing the entire system, unless other members put up with its profligate spending. Greece isn’t the only one: Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain–the so-called PIGS–all seem to have unsustainable debts that threaten the euro.

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The New Feudalism

By | | Regional planning, Travels
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Feudalism–an economic system in which all land is owned by the monarch and everyone else must pay rent to use that land–supposedly ended hundreds of years ago. But a map of the world showing the current status of property suggests that it is alive and well over most of the planet. Moreover, a new form of feudalism that nominally allows people to own land but severely limits what they can do with that land dominates much of the rest of the world.

For years, various surveys of economic freedom have attempted to portray the amount of liberty people enjoy in different countries. However, none of these surveys have explicitly included property rights as one of the measures of freedom, probably because there is no easy index for such rights.

That was supposed to be remedied by the new International Property Rights Index. This judges a nation’s respect for property rights using ten criteria. However, only one of these has to do with ownership of real estate, and none of them consider how regulated such owners might be. As a result, it gives high ratings to countries in which property rights are actually severely limited.

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San Jose Bus Ridership Plummets

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The San Jose Mercury News points out the “staggering drop in VTA bus ridership” and suggests “dramatic changes” are needed to reverse that decline. However, it misses the elephant in the room, namely that the drop in ridership is directly due to the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) cutting bus service in order to fund its rail transit fantasies–fantasies that have been repeatedly endorse by the Mercury News.

The Mercury News reports “ridership on buses and light-rail trains has dropped a staggering 23 percent since 2001.” This understates the problem as light-rail ridership actually grew by about 19 percent during this time period, mainly because of an expansion of light-rail lines from 29.2 route miles in 2001 to 40.5 route miles in 2014. The small ridership increase gained by a 44 percent growth in route miles is distressing in itself, especially considering that the area’s 13 percent population growth accounts for most of the light-rail ridership growth.

The real tragedy is what happened to bus ridership, which declined by 32 percent from more than 48 million trips in 2001 to less than 33 million in 2014. (Light-rail and bus ridership and service numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series.) As it happens, in the same time period vehicle miles of bus service fell by 22 percent, a drop that explains most if not all of the decline in ridership.

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Britain’s Self-Inflicted Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
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The Antiplanner has spent the last week in Britain, and everywhere I went people were talking about Brexit: the vote in June on whether Britain should leave the European Union. Britain originally joined the union when it was a free-trade area, but since then it has grown increasingly intrusive on the economies of its member states.

While those intrusions are costly to Britain, the country’s biggest economic problem is self-inflicted: the housing crisis that makes Britain one of the least-affordable housing markets in the world. That crisis directly results from land-use laws passed to contain urban growth within specified boundaries. Since passing the first of these laws, the Town & Country Planning Act of 1947, British housing has not only grown more expensive, the nation has experienced four housing bubbles and collapses.

Until 1860 or so, all of the land in Britain was owned by an aristocracy that made up less than 4.5 percent of the population. Today, more than 60 percent of families nominally own the land they live on, though I use the word “nominally” because the official position of the government remains that “The Crown is the ultimate owner of all land in England and Wales.” This probably refers to alloidal title, while individuals may own a fee-simple title or freehold.

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Honolulu Madness

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Honolulu city auditor’s review of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) found numerous problems, including the use of obsolete and unreliable decision-making tools, failure to analyze major changes in the planned rail line, and leasing more office space than the agency needs. The rail line HART is constructing is already 25 percent over budget, and based on the problems found in the audit, the auditor “anticipate[s] additional cost overruns.”

Rather than fix the problems, HART officials chose to attack the messenger, claiming that the audit (which had been requested by the city council) was “politically motivated.” When the auditor shared a confidential draft of the audit with HART, HART shared it with unauthorized people, attempted to intimidate the auditors, and went to the press to attack the auditors before the audit was made public.

Not many people believe the agency’s attack on the city auditor. Honolulu’s mayor asked the the chair of HART’s board and another one of its board members to resign, perhaps hoping to use them as scapegoats for the project’s failings. Yet shaking the top of the agency won’t help fix the fundamental problems, which are that a $6 billion construction project is really beyond the region’s needs or the agency’s abilities.

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