The Antiplanner » Home Page

2012 Natural Resources Inventory Update

By | | Follow up, Useful Data
1 Comment

A few weeks ago the Antiplanner posted information about the 2012 Natural Resources Inventory. The post noted that the published documents broke down the amount of developed land in the nation by “large urban and built up” (meaning more than 10 acres of development), “small built up” (meaning more than a quarter but less than 10 acres) and “rural transportation,” but did not include a state-by-state breakdown of these categories.

Since then, the Natural Resources Conservation Service was nice enough to send me a spreadsheet with the state-by-state breakdown (for every state except Alaska). There are no real surprises with it, but I’ve posted it here as may be useful to readers.
Ashwagandha is buying viagra in uk bought that also very effective herb. That’s the reason why it’s important for men to first let their doctors conduct tests on them to determine the canadian cialis no prescription http://secretworldchronicle.com/2014/10/ cause. If you are looking for homeopathic remedies without consulting a doctor in person, placing the order online requires very few efforts and cheap soft viagra extremely short time. Symptoms include Chest pain, women may be more likely to have prejudice and confusion, such as some researches buy generic viagra see description regarded as: “In women’s group that limited population…have worked for 20 years or even more…the trend of suffering from breast only a little rise”, indeed they are not confirmed. “Attribute to the night shift working, you can get compensation” said Grete Christensen, the deputy president of Danish Nurses’ Organization, “the reason that.
One caveat is that the Natural Resources Inventory is a sampling survey, so it is always worthwhile to present it in conjunction with 2010 census data on urbanized lands. The Census Bureau’s definition of “urban” is a little different than the one used in the Natural Resources Inventory, but the two numbers together confirm that, for most states, the vast majority of land remains undeveloped.

Growing Urban Areas Must Grow

By | | Housing
13 Comments

The Antiplanner recently listed more than half a dozen academic papers that concluded that growth management makes housing more expensive. To this number might be added a paper (really a lengthy blog post with some neat graphics) by economist Issi Romem, who works for the real-estate web site BuildZoom. Romem finds that urban areas with unaffordable housing haven’t expanded geographically to match their population growth, while areas that have expanded geographically remain affordable.

An article in the Wall Street Journal breathlessly reports this as news, when it is only news to those who have drunk the kool-aide of urban planning. The writer of the article, Laura Kusisto, has apparently listened to too many urban planners herself, for she reports that urban “sprawl” has a “tendency to lead to oversupply that can lead home prices to crash.”
For example, some people prefer Creams/Oils/Lotions so that they can trust. cialis 40 mg It contains more than fifty types of natural herbs that have multiple function on curing the inflammation. opacc.cv cialis pills canada Anti-impotency pill Kamagra works best when taken empty stomach or after eating a low-fat meal and with a glass of cialis no prescription water. These muscles are located in the levitra online usa corpus cavernosum of the penis.
This is completely wrong; the cities that Romem reports have grown geographically did not bubble and crash in the 2000s. Instead, the urban areas that saw housing prices crash are the ones that tried to contain sprawl. Too bad the WSJ can’t afford to hire reporters who understand a smattering of economics, such as the fact that restricting supply makes a good inelastic which in turn makes its price more volatile.

NY MTA to APTA: Quit Wasting Our Money

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has formally quit its membership in the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), the nation’s principle transit lobby. In a harshly worded seven-page letter, MTA accused APTA of poor governance, an undue focus on small transit agencies, and having an embarrassingly large compensation package to APTA’s president.

The MTA and its affiliates, Metro North, the Long Island Railroad, and New York City Transit, together carry 35 percent of all transit riders in America. Since MTA’s ridership has been growing while transit elsewhere has declined, this percentage is increasing.

Yet APTA’s focus has been on lobbying for increased funding for smaller agencies, including building new rail transit lines in cities that haven’t had rail transit and extending transit service in smaller cities and rural areas that have had little transit at all. As a result, says the letter, MTA has been short-changed by roughly a billion dollars a year in federal funding that it would have received if funds were distributed according to the number of transit riders carried.

Continue reading →

Refugees or Immigrants?

By | | News commentary
10 Comments

Early this week, the Antiplanner listened to a presentation in Greece about the Syrian refugee crisis. The presenter noted that almost all members of the European Union had signed the Dublin agreement defining how countries should treat refugees. A major exception, however, was Turkey, which treated people fleeing Syria as potential immigrants rather than refugees. The speaker made it sound as though Turkey was heartless and uncaring about refugee problems.

Arda Akçiçek, a researcher at Istanbul’s Medipol University and activist with the Association for Liberal Thinking, has a very different view: by treating Syrians as immigrants rather than refugees, Turkey is treating them as potential economic contributors rather than likely recipients of welfare.

Some sheer numbers support this viewpoint. Germany has accepted something like 300,000 to 360,000 refugees, more than any other European nation under the Dublin agreement. The country has allocated more than $19 billion to refugees for 2016 alone, or roughly $55,000 per refugee.

Continue reading →

Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Despite a “growing population, a rebounding economy, growing total employment, and an aggressively argued hypothesis that the millennial generation is meaningfully different than their forefathers,” says transportation researcher Steven Polzin, “transit ridership has remained stubbornly modest.” That’s a generous view that takes into account slow ridership growth between 2012 and 2014 but ridership declines in 2015.

Polzin points to numerous factors that work against transit: lower fuel prices, increased auto sharing, increased cycling and walking, and diminishing returns on extensions of existing transit services. He also points out that, contrary to claims that Americans are substituting transit for driving in large numbers, recent data suggest that “the new normal for travel trends is looking more like the old normal.”

However, he misses a couple of key points. First, Polzin compares transit ridership over time with the population, concluding that per capita transit ridership “is a pretty straight horizontal line since about 1970.” In fact, he should have compared transit ridership with the urban population, as few rural residents are served by transit. Since the urban population is growing faster than the overall population, per capita urban transit ridership has declined by about 15 percent since 1970. This makes transit’s future appear even dimmer than Polzin suggests.

Continue reading →

The Deeper Problems Behind Immigration

By | | News commentary
22 Comments

Immigration is a major issue in Europe just as it has been in the United States. In the U.S., there has been a fear that illegal immigrants would become criminals and/or live off of welfare programs, costing taxpayers’ money. Similar fears underlie European resistance to helping refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries torn by war. There is also a a fear that, unlike previous waves of immigrants, those entering the United States or Europe today make little effort to assimilate, sticking with their own languages, cultures, and intolerances.

In the United States, these fears appear to be largely unfounded. Illegal immigrants are not eligible for many kinds of welfare, yet they pay well over $10 billion per year in federal income and social security taxes yet they will never be allowed to collect social security. Other than the fact that illegal immigration is a crime, immigrants commit far fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans. Finally, Latino immigrants to the U.S. have been assimilating at least as fast if not faster than previous immigrants.

To the extent that illegal immigrants do end up using taxpayer-supported programs such as healthcare and some kinds of some kinds of welfare, this indicates there are problems with those programs, not with immigration itself. When Lyndon Johnson created many welfare programs in the 1960s, they were aimed at getting people out of poverty. When Richard Nixon became president, he dismantled those programs and replaced them with straight welfare. In other words, instead of helping people out of poverty, Nixon’s programs paid people to remain poor. That’s a problem that has only been partially corrected since then.

Continue reading →

The Balkans

By | | Housekeeping
2 Comments

In the past week, the Antiplanner has visited Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and currently Romania. While I haven’t had time to sort through photos in detail, here are a few. I don’t pretend to be an expert on these countries based on my short visits, but I have learned quite a bit.

Many of the former communist nations received aid from the European Union and they have spent that money or local taxpayer money building roads and other infrastructure. Macedonia, however, has spent between 500 million and 750 million euros turning the center of its capital, Skopje, into a grand plaza surrounded by huge buildings reminiscent of Las Vegas. I was told that many of the buildings are shoddily constructed and probably won’t last a long time.

Continue reading →

Surprise! TriMet Wants More Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
11 Comments

In a move that surprised no one, the staff of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, wants to build light rail instead of bus-rapid transit between Portland and Sherwood. Since the Obama administration no longer requires transit agencies to do a rigorous alternatives analysis, this decision was based on subjective criteria and erroneous assumptions, yet will probably not be challenged by either TriMet’s board or the federal government that will have to pay for most of the line.

TriMet’s last light-rail line cost about $168 million per mile. This proposal is for an 11.5-mile line that will cost at least $2 billion, or $174 million per mile. Of course, that cost is likely to go up. By comparison, Portland’s first light-rail line cost only about $28 million per mile in today’s dollars.

A state auditor says TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is falling behind on light-rail maintenance. TriMet’s general manager says that the agency’s pension and health-care obligations are so great that it will have to cut all transit service by 70 percent by 2025 to meet those obligations. So naturally, it makes perfect sense to talk about spending $2 billion that the agency doesn’t have on another low-capacity rail line.

Continue reading →

No Delays, No Hesitation, No Compromise

By | | Mission
5 Comments

The Antiplanner’s travels through the Balkans–yesterday, Skopje, Macedonia; today, Tuzla, Bosnia; tomorrow, Sarajevo–aren’t leaving much time for detailed posts. However, I happened to come across this video of a speech given by Lyndon Johnson 51 years ago that remains relevant today. Perhaps more than any other president, Johnson inspires mixed feelings as one of the best and in other ways one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had. But this speech shows him at his finest.

A few days before the speech, American television screens showed Selma, Alabama police beating up peaceful demonstrators who were seeking voting rights for blacks. Johnson was so angered by what he saw that he asked to address Congress and told them that he would submit a bill that would require all states to remove all barriers to letting blacks vote in all elections. He didn’t ask them to pass the bill; he told them it was their obligation to pass it. Many southern members of Congress sat in the audience looking disgruntled, and he merely stared them down in disgust.

Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Falling

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Transit ridership in 2015 was 1.26 percent less than in 2014, with bus ridership falling by nearly 3 percent. But transit advocates wanted to lead with good news, so Progressive Railroading‘s coverage is headlined, “rail ridership increased as overall public transit use dipped 1.3 percent.”

Why did rail ridership increase? In the case of heavy rail (subways and elevateds), the answer is that New York is enjoying its “largest jobs boom ever,” so subway ridership there grew by 14 million annual rides. Heavy rail as a whole grew by only 9 million annual rides, so take away New York and nationwide subway/elevated ridership declined. Among the big losers in heavy rail were Baltimore (-11%), San Juan (-15%), Los Angeles (-5%), and Washington DC (-4%). Of course, rail supporters in most of those cities still want to build more train lines.

For light rail, the answer is that Minneapolis-St. Paul opened its new Green line. This boosted the region’s light-rail ridership by 7 million rides, without which nationwide light-rail ridership would have declined by 5 million annual trips. Among the biggest losers were Baltimore (-15%), Cleveland (-6z%), Los Angeles, and Sacramento (each -5%).

Continue reading →