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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 →

Getting the Most from Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Back in 2009, when I first suggested that urban transportation would soon be taken over by driverless cars, a friend of mine told me that he would never use a driverless car because “I get a testosterone thrill from having my hands on the wheel of a car.” I point out to him that, if cars drove themselves, we wouldn’t need open container laws and he and his girlfriend could make out in the back seat while the vehicle was in motion. His eyes bugged out and I knew I had won a convert.

What’s happening in the back of this van? Only the occupants and Waymo know for sure. Photo by Rob Pegaroro.

So I wasn’t surprised to read a report that “San Franciscans are having sex in robotaxis,” with some people doing it so often it is almost routine. Many of the vehicles have darkened windows that make it difficult to see inside, especially at night, creating a comfortable feeling of privacy. The travelers may not realize that Waymo and Cruise have cameras recording both outside and inside the vehicles, but the companies say no one looks at the videos unless there is some kind of an incident such as an accident. Continue reading →

Working from Home Expected to Rise

By | | News commentary
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Mike Myers, the director of Portland’s community safety program, is in charge of reducing gun violence and increasing street safety. This job paid him $208,263 last year, and he manages to do it while working at home. Home, for Myers, happens to be a gated community in Las Vegas, 750 miles from Portland.

Click image to review a copy of this report.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence that Portland has seen the fastest-growing homicide rates in the highest in the nation and the city suffered a record number of homicides in 2022. Or perhaps there are some jobs that just can’t be performed as well at home, at least if that home is hundreds of miles away. Continue reading →

Spending Other People’s Money

By | | Transportation
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Washington state Democrats believe that a Portland-Seattle-Vancouver high-speed rail line is vital to the future of the Northwest. It is so vital, in fact, that they want someone else to pay for it, namely the federal government. The federal government, after all, seems to be unique in the world in that it can spend unlimited amounts of money without raising taxes to cover those costs.

You’ll never guess why they think high-speed rail is needed so badly. According to a letter from Washington members of Congress to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the high-speed train will “allow people to live in less densely populated areas and work anywhere in the megaregion.” So much for the supposed benefits of high-density living! Continue reading →

Oregon Governor: Keep Homeless Inside UGBs

By | | Housing
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Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, knows what her priorities are. With her endorsement, the state is spending billions of dollars to deal with its housing shortage. Thanks partly to that housing shortage, homeless camps can be found all over the state, from Portland to tiny Sisters, a city of 2,000.

“Unmanaged” homeless camp in Portland. Photo by Graywalls.

Some of that money is supposed to be used to create managed homeless camps, where homeless people supposedly will have access to “food, hygiene, litter collection and treatment for mental health and substance abuse.” However, Governor Kotek recently informed officials in Bend, central Oregon’s largest city, that they would not be allowed to have a managed homeless camp outside of the city’s urban-growth boundary. “We must exhaust every possible option within the UGB for shelter sites,” she said. Continue reading →

The Irrational Planning Process

By | | Regional planning
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Land-use and transportation planning is supposed to follow a rational planning process. That process includes defining the problem that needs to be solved, identifying alternative solutions, evaluating the alternatives, developing a final plan based on the best alternative or combination of alternatives, implementing the plan, monitoring the effects to see how well reality matches planning assumptions, and using the results of that monitoring as feedback into future plans.

This 1969 book describes the rational planning process on page 95.

The rational planning model has been around since at least 1969. Yet today, more than 50 years later, hardly any government agency follows this model. Instead, most government plans I’ve reviewed follow what can only be called an irrational planning process. Continue reading →

Land-Use Law Kills Nearly 100 People in Maui

By | | Planning Disasters
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At the latest count, 93 people died in the Maui fire that also burned most of the town of Lahaina. The blame for this fire can be traced directly to Hawaii’s 62-year-old land-use law, which was written to protect Hawaii’s agricultural industry but had the opposite result.

The land-use law divided the state into urban and rural zones and heavily restricted development of the rural areas. As the state’s population grew, Maui’s median home prices rose from about 3 times median family incomes in 1969 to 7.9 times median family incomes in 2021. Any prices above 5 times median incomes are unaffordable since banks won’t approve a mortgage for a home that costs that much more than a family’s income. Continue reading →

New Orleans Dismantles Bike Lanes

By | | Transportation
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In 2020, New Orleans planned to install bike lanes on 75 miles of streets, reducing the capacity of those streets to move cars. The residents of the first neighborhoods where they were installed strongly protested and are happy to report that, in late July and early August, all newly installed bike lanes have been or are being removed. Concrete barriers that once separated bicycles from autos have been ground away and stripes separating bicycles from autos have been replaced by signs reminding auto drivers to share the roads with bicycles.

Although strongly supported by many bicycle advocacy groups, bicycle lanes have questionable benefits for bicycle riders. The lanes are designed to safeguard bicycle riders from being hit from behind by automobiles, but this kind of accident is rare. Instead, most bicycle-auto collisions take place at intersections, and bicycle lanes usually disappear at the intersections. By creating an illusion of safety, bicycle lanes may increase cycling on busy streets and effectively put more bicycle riders in harms way by encouraging them to cross intersections where they are more likely to get hit. Continue reading →