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Housing First Fails

By | | Housing
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The number of homeless people in the United States has grown by 33 percent since 2020, according to a report released last month by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A chart on page 2 of the report (shown below) indicates that the number of homeless people was gradually shrinking between 2007 (when the annual homeless census began) and 2016, but then started rapidly growing in 2019 and even more rapidly growing in 2022.

Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of the report from which this chart was taken.

In the 1980s, groups and agencies worried about homelessness began programs aimed at treating drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and other conditions that led people to become homeless. More recently, low-income housing groups have advocating increasing spending on housing subsidies to provide shelter for homeless people. These two alternatives are known as “Treatment First” and “Housing First.” Continue reading →

Happy New Year

By | | News commentary
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Last year was quite possibly the most politically tumultuous since at least 1884, when one presidential candidate was widely believed to have accepted bribes and the other was accused of rape. It seems predictable that, between DOGE, tariffs, immigration disputes, and international strife, 2025 will be even more politically fractious. Whether that’s a good thing may depend on your political persuasion.

Grizzly steps gingerly into the New Year.

Last year ended with the death of Jimmy Carter, who has often been described as a failed president but a great ex-president. Yet for the last few days we’ve been treated to a debate about just how bad a president he was and whether his post-presidency was all that was claimed. Continue reading →

Transit Executives Rake in the Dough

By | | Transportation
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The news from California this week is that Michael Hursh, the CEO of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit), is resigning, but the agency will continue to pay him through September as a “senior advisor.” The real news is how much he was paid: according to Transparent California, in 2022 he collected $556,045.

Former AC Transit CEO Michael Hursh and current AC Transit board member Sarah Syed. Photos by AC Transit.

Transit agencies have historically paid their executives well, but $556,000 seems like a lot even for these agencies. So I decided to do a quick survey of transit agency executive pay. First, Hursh’s resignation is worth examining in a little more detail. Continue reading →

Selling BLM Lands Won’t Make Homes Affordable

By | | Housing, Public lands
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Economist Thomas Sowell, who I respect a great deal, has gotten sucked into the stampede to sell public lands in order to simultaneously reduce the debt and make housing more affordable. Advocates of this view are ignoring clear indications that selling these lands will not accomplish either goal.

BLM lands: far from food, water, and jobs.

One advocate for this point of view, William Perry Pendley, defensively argues that he is not proposing to sell wilderness areas, national parks, or even national forests, but mainly just Bureau of Land Management lands. The problem with this is that most BLM lands are lands leftover after homesteaders, ranchers, timber companies, and others picked the most valuable federal lands for themselves, thus earning BLM lands the title, “the lands no one wanted.” Continue reading →

St. Louis Gates Its Light-Rail Stations

By | | Transportation
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Light rail suffers the highest crime rates of any mode of transit and this is largely due to the honor system of fare payment. St. Louis Metro is addressing this by adding gates to its light-rail stations. Unlike most cities, St. Louis can do this because its light-rail system is entirely separated from streets and sidewalks.

Gates have been installed in four of the region’s 38 light-rail stations, but Metro hasn’t yet installed fare systems. Until it does, it has security officers standing at each gate to check that customers have paid their fares before they are allowed to go on the platform. Metro expects to have gates at all 38 stations installed by January 2026, but hasn’t said how soon it will have fare payment systems installed. Continue reading →

Happy Holidays

By | | Housekeeping
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Best wishes for the holiday season and the coming New Year from the Antiplanner and the Antiplanning dog, Grizzly.

Grizzly and Mount Jefferson

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, the Yule Solstice, Kwanzaa, or are just enjoying a few days off with your family, we hope you have a safe and enjoyable holiday and a productive New Year.

The Scandal of the Public Non-Profit

By | | News commentary
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This is the time of year when we think charitable thoughts about those less fortunate than ourselves and, if we can afford it, give to charities to help such people. But there are some charities that are hardly charitable.

Excerpt from IRS form 990 submitted by Mercy Housing showing amounts paid to its top staff members. Click image for a larger view.

In order to qualify for tax-deductible donations, non-profits must persuade the Internal Revenue Service that they are a charitable organization. Such organizations, says the IRS, are “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, or other specified purposes.” Continue reading →

Urban Wishful Thinking Index

By | | Transportation
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Something called the Oliver Wyman Forum has worked with the University of California, Berkeley to publish an annual “urban mobility readiness index.” This is supposed to be a measure of how ready cities are for the coming “mobility revolution.” Unfortunately, it is more a measure of how ready cities are for the nineteenth-century’s mobility revolution.

Click image to read this report.

The latest index ranks San Francisco as the best in the world when in fact it is one of the least mobile cities and urban areas in the nation. Dallas and Houston, two of the most mobile urban areas in America, are ranked 34 and 35 out of 70 major cities. Considering that Moscow, one of the most mobility-repressed cities in the world, is ranked not far below Houston, this index isn’t providing much help regarding urban mobility. Continue reading →

Highways, Amtrak, Airlines Set Records in 2024

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 2.8 percent more miles in October 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. Both urban and rural driving were greater in October 2024 than October 2019.

Meanwhile, Amtrak brags that it carried an all-time record number of passengers in its fiscal year 2024 (which ended September 30). In that year, it carried 32.8 million riders and 6.54 billion passenger-miles. That is only a small fraction of the number carried by passenger trains when they were private, as ridership peaked at 1.2 billion in 1920 and passenger-miles peaked at 89 billion in 1944. But 2024 was a record year since Amtrak began in 1971. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 77% of Pre-Covid Riders in October

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s public transit systems carried 77.3 percent as many riders in October 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the highest level transit has achieved since the beginning of the pandemic.

The increase is likely due to more people returning to downtown jobs instead of working remotely. While President Biden seems content to let many federal employees work at home, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to order them to return to work, which will create an interesting situation as the new administration takes office in January. Musk and Ramaswamy have hinted that their real goal is to get many federal employees to quit, thus relieving the president of the necessity of firing them to achieve the goal of reducing the federal budget by $2 trillion. Continue reading →