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California Homes Still Sell Above the Asking Price

By | | Housing
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A math-challenged report finds that homes in the San Francisco Bay Area are still selling above their asking price despite census data showing that the region’s population is declining. The report says that Vallejo (which is part of the San Francisco Bay Area but the Census Bureau counts as a separate urban area) “is the number one metro area for selling homes over the list price,” followed by San Francisco and Rochester, New York.

This 1,020-square-foot house on a 4,800-square-foot lot is offered for sale in Vallejo for $499,000, but if recent experience is any guide it will actually sell for around $536,000.

The report says that homes in Vallejo typically sell for 1.07 percent more than their asking price and homes in San Francisco sell for 1.03 percent more than their asking price. However, this is wrong: what the report means is that homes in Vallejo sell for 1.07 times their asking price (which is 7 percent more) and homes in San Francisco (meaning the San Francisco-Oakland urban area) sell for 1.03 times their asking price (or 3 percent more). Continue reading →

U.S. Fertility Rates Lowest in History

By | | News commentary
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U.S. fertility rates have fallen to just 1.6 per woman. This has led some to fear that the United States may face the same kind of demographic collapse that is besetting Japan.

While some may cheer that this makes overpopulation less of a problem, low fertility rates translate to serious economic problems. As demographer Peter Zeihan notes, people in their 20s and 30s spend lots of money, people in their 40s through 60s save money that can then be used for investments in improved productivity, but older people large retire from the economy. The young consumers drive economic growth and the middle-aged savers fund that growth. If the ratio of younger people to older people falls too low, then the economy stops growing, which reduces economic mobility and security. Continue reading →

Housing Affordability in 2023

By | | Housing
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Due to the large number of people seeking to move during and after the pandemic, the number of severely unaffordable housing markets quintupled between 2019 and 2022, says a new report from demographer Wendell Cox that traces the changes in housing affordability in 174 major U.S. housing markets. Of those 174, Cox classified 44 as affordable in 2019, but only 11 were still affordable in 2022. The good news is that’s a slight improvement over 2021, when only 9 were affordable.

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 28-page report.

Cox measures affordability by comparing median home prices with median household incomes. This is slightly different from the Antiplanner’s comparison of median home prices with median family incomes. Both of us consider housing to be affordable when median prices are less than three times median incomes and severely unaffordable when median prices are more than five times median incomes. Continue reading →

The Next Step in Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Elon Musk took a drive in one of his cars using the latest version of its full driverless software. The current software uses 300,000 lines of code to tell the cars how to turn left, how to respond to pedestrians and other vehicles, and so forth. Instead of code, the latest beta software is based on neural networks, meaning the computer has learned and will learn how to deal with various situations based on past experiences.

“It’s all nets, baby,” he said during the drive, “nothing but nets.” As I understand it, this is the approach George Hotz was taking when he was working on an his autonomous car software. Hotz tried to train his software without going through all of California’s state licensing requirements, and when the state and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tried to force him to comply with their regulations, he left the business. Continue reading →

Driver Shortage; Money Shortage; What to Do?

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are “scrambling” to find funding to keep operating in the face of permanently lower ridership. At the same time, driver shortages are hampering agencies’ ability to keep running buses and trains.

This driver was so overworked that she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a utility pole. Yet the bus she was driving was empty, so why were she and the bus there in the first place?

There’s an easy solution to both problems: reduce service. Why run buses and trains that are nearly empty? Ridership isn’t going to come back just because the transit vehicles are there. Cutting service to the levels agencies can afford to operate without further subsidies will also help alleviate driver shortages. Reducing service will in turn reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve social equity because most of the taxes that would be needed to maintain service are regressive.

How to Pay for Amtrak’s Deficits

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak operations lost $1.2 billion last year without even counting depreciation and the other costs that Amtrak pretends aren’t real. (The $1.2 billion is calculated by adding $885 million “adjusted operating earnings” to the $329 million “state supported train revenue” that Amtrak pretends isn’t a subsidy.) A railroad in Japan provides an example of one way Amtrak could cover this deficit.

The Choshi Electric Railway hit some hard times in the 1990s, as did most Japanese businesses, due to the nation’s economic slump. The railway almost went out of business, but then it hit upon the idea of asking its customers and patrons to buy rice crackers. Today, it makes twice as much money on its rice crackers than on the rail line itself. Continue reading →

Time to Sell the Postal Service

By | | News commentary
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Why do we still have a postal service? In 2021, the agency cost federal taxpayers around $18 billion in operating and capital subsidies. Plus, in 2022, Congress bailed it out from having to pay $56 billion of employee health care obligations, meaning federal taxpayers are now obligated to cover those costs.

Around 250 years ago, mail was the closest thing the prospective nation had to the internet. When the Continental Congress was forming the fledging U.S. government, it decided in 1775 that America’s mail should be carried by a federal agency, not the states or private enterprise. One reason for creating a federal post office was to bring the country closer together, as distances would be less important if it cost the same to mail a letter across the country as across the street. This was critical as the land area of the original 13 states was far bigger than any European country other than Russia. Continue reading →

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By | | Wildfire
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The Antiplanner’s exurban area has been filled with smoke the last few days as winds have blown soot from wildfires in western Oregon towards central Oregon. As bad as the air has been here, it usually wasn’t as bad as it was in New York City a couple of months ago due to fires in Canada.

Smoke obscures the sun from New York’s Long Island in June 2023. Photo by Don Sutherland.

Canada has seen more land burn so far this year — more than 34 million acres as of August 18 — than any full year in its history: the previous record was 17.5 million acres for all of 1995. The Maui fires, of course, have had unprecedented impacts, with at least 115 known dead to date and more than 1,000 missing. Many are blaming these fires on or saying they are evidence of human-caused climate change. Continue reading →

Affordable Housing Not Affordable

By | | Housing
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The news media is discovering something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: so-called affordable housing isn’t affordable. The federal, state, and local governments spend tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing supposedly affordable housing, yet few people who need such housing get into the projects and many of those who do can’t afford the rents that are charged.

104 of the 116 units of the Alameda View Apartments in Aurora, Colorado are dedicated to people earning up to 60 percent of median income, which in the Denver metro area is $75,300 a year. That means average monthly will be as high as $1,883 a month.

As a recent article in the LAist points out, more than 450,000 households in Los Angeles have incomes low enough to qualify for affordable housing, yet fewer than 50,000 such units have been built. One project that opened in 2022 received 7,500 applications for just 65 apartments. Continue reading →

“Priming the Pump” = Subsidizing the Myth

By | | Transportation
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Maryland has decided it needs to “take a more active role in promoting development around transit stations,” according to an article in the Baltimore Banner. “It’s priming the pump to get these things moving,” says Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld, who used to be general manager of Washington Metro.

Maryland’s stack-’em-and-pack-’em vision for transit recovery. But what if nobody wants to live there?

As of May, Baltimore transit ridership was about 67 percent of pre-pandemic levels, slightly less than the national average. But most of that was due to buses, which were at 73 percent. Baltimore light rail was only 59 percent and Baltimore’s subway was just 58 percent. Wiedefeld hopes that promoting transit-oriented developments will boost ridership. Continue reading →