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Green Ridge Fire Follow-Up

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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The Forest Service says that it has pretty much contained the Green Ridge Fire. When the Antiplanner reported on the fire last Tuesday (August 6), it had burned 550 acres, and officials said they expected to have it contained by the end of August 7. In fact, it took at least four more days and a total cost of close to $5 million.


This map shows the status of the fire on Wednesday, August 7. Notice that the Forest Service was building a fire line (black line) well south of the actual fire front (red line). Click image for a larger view.

On the night of August 8, a strong wind whipped up the fire and sent fire brands that created spot fires as much as a mile away from the main fire, increasing the area burned to 950 acres. But on the evening of Friday, August 9, firefighters were helped by a rain storm that didn’t last long but was quite heavy. Rain fell again the afternoon of August 10. Despite the rain and Forest Service assurances that “lower temperatures and higher relative humidities are helping firefighting efforts,” the number of acres burned climbed to 1,150 by Saturday morning.

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Building Urban Prosperity

By | | City planning
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Faithful Antiplanner ally Wendell Cox has recently written a series of papers on urban development that should be read by every city official concerned about the economic future of their city. First, for a blog about World Streets, Cox argues that those who are concerned about urban prosperity should focus on ends, such as eradicating poverty and spreading affluence, rather than means, such as increasing density.

Second, for Canada’s Frontier Centre, Cox argues that urban containment strategies do more harm than good. Again, he says (but with far more detail) “the focus should be on objectives, not means.”

Most recently, in an article in the Daily Beast co-authored by Joel Kotkin, Cox rates the nation’s most aspirational cities, meaning cities with a high quality of life and numerous economic opportunities. The best cities, they find, are those with “cultural amenities and attitudes of ‘progressive’ blue states but in a distinctly red-state environment of low costs, less regulation, and lower taxes.” The top five cities, they find, are Austin, New Orleans, Houston, Oklahoma City, and Raleigh.

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But It Always Loses Money

By | | Transportation
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A new poll finds that three out of four Americans never or almost never ride transit. Just 6 percent use it daily; 7 percent once a week; 4 percent two or three times a month; and 7 percent once every few months.

The numbers seem a little high, as the 2010 census found that less than 5 percent of workers ride transit to work. Moreover, other data show that people who say they ride transit often drive instead, while people who say they drive almost always drive, so the census numbers overestimate transit commuting.

In any case, the poll goes on to say that Americans “still tend to believe the government should back mass transit projects as long as they don’t lose money.” But all transit loses money? How did the pollsters reach this conclusion?

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Air Show

By | | News commentary, Wildfire
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It’s hot and dry in Central Oregon, and a lightning storm on July 31 lit at least 48 fires in or around the Deschutes National Forest. Forest Service firefighters quickly suppressed all but one of them; unfortunately, a 58-year-old firefighter named John Hammack was killed when a tree fell on him.


Fires burning on Green Ridge Sunday night, August 4. Click image for a larger view.

The one fire still burning is about seven miles from the Antiplanner’s home and within view of my back deck. So we’ve been treated to a parade of helicopters and air tankers of various kinds attempting to control the fire. The Forest Service reports that it is spending about $200,000 a day, but the fire grew 90 acres Sunday and 175 acres Monday.

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The Suburbs Are Still Alive

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Ho-hum, another prediction that “suburbs are dead,” this time from Fortune magazine assistant editor Leigh Gallagher. Her just-released book, The End of the Suburbs, argues that Americans no longer dream of owning a house with a yard and driving to work and everywhere else.

“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”

As it turns out, however, all the studies don’t show that. Take, for example, the Census Bureau report (previously noted here) that new homes are larger than ever or this survey, which found that three out four millennials aspire to live in a house of their own–and many of them are working hard to achieve that.

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Was the Twentieth Century a Blip?

By | | News commentary
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An economist named Robert Gordon thinks that the rapid growth the United States experienced from about 1870 to 1970 was just a blip resulting from the discovery of new inventions that will never be repeated again. As a result, he predicts that our future economic growth will never come close to the growth we experienced during most of the twentieth century. His prediction may be right, but not for the reasons he thinks.

Gordon’s argument, presented in detail in this 2012 paper, is that the inventions produced after 1870–electricity, telecommunications, powered flight, and automobility–were so profound that their effects will not be repeated again. They had far more of an impact on the economy than the previous, steam-driven industrial revolution because they affected more segments of that economy. And they had more of an impact than the later, computer-driven revolution, because people of 1870 were far less wealthy than we are today and so it didn’t take as much to add to their wealth.

Gordon is expressing a technology theory of economic growth that many, if not most, economists today do not support. If the technology theory were true, then the same technical innovations that made American wealthy should have made South Americans and Africans and Indians and Chinese and Russians wealthy at the same time. After all, there are really no secrets behind electric motors, internal combustion engines, and the shape of airplane wings that enable flight.

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Another New Urban Failure

By | | Regional planning
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“Three years after its completion, most of the storefronts remain vacant” in a mixed-use development next to a BART station in Pleasant Hill, California, reports the Contra Costa Times. “Projects that combine housing with retail space are a poor fit for the suburbs,” the paper reports one expert as saying.

Mixed-use developments are the gold ring on the land development merry-go-round for urban planners, most of whom don’t really understand land development. They think that mixed-use developments will lead people to walk more and drive less and therefore try to force them onto neighborhoods, particularly near rail transit stations, using prescriptive zoning.

In the Pleasant Hill case, the developer was probably required to build 34,000 square feet of commercial space in order to get a permit to build 422 luxury apartments. But a few hundred two-person families is not enough to support that much retail space, and people who enter and exit the nearby BART station are too intent on getting to work or home to stop and shop. According to commercial real estate broker John Cumbelich, the Pleasant Hill development could support, at most, about 5,000 square feet of commercial space.

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Is Economic Immobility Due to Sprawl?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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For the second time in a week, Paul Krugman has written about sprawl. This time he is as wrong as the last, when he blamed Detroit’s bankruptcy on sprawl. Now he blames Atlanta’s entrenched poverty on urban sprawl. “The city may just be too spread out,” he says, “so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Krugman quotes a study that finds that one of many factors reducing social mobility include “areas in which low income individuals were residentially segregated from middle income individuals.” But income segregation is very different from sprawl, and can take place in communities of any density. New York City, for example, has pretty high economic segregation.

Krugman adds that Atlanta’s sprawl “would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t.” He obviously doesn’t know the history of mass transit in Atlanta, which had a great transit system until regional leaders decided to build an expensive rail transit system. Since they aimed the rail lines at middle-class neighborhoods and sacrificed bus service to low-income neighborhoods to pay for the rail lines, transit’s share of commuting has fallen by more than 60 percent and per capita transit ridership has fallen by more than two thirds.

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The Failure of Inclusionary Zoning

By | | Housing
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Denver’s urban-growth boundary has made housing expensive. More than a decade ago, the city blamed “failure by the private market to produce enough affordable housing” (see p. 5). To fix this “failure,” the city required developers to build “affordable housing.” Now, the city admits that this ordinance is a failure.

Data from the 2011 American Community Survey indicates that the median value of owner-occupied homes in Denver is nearly four times median family incomes. It should be just two times, which is typical for cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries or other restrictive land-use laws. So housing prices are nearly twice as high as they ought to be.

As this city document explains, Denver’s “inclusionary zoning” ordinance requires developers who build 30 or more homes or condos at one time to sell at least 10 percent of those homes at “affordable” prices. Typically, this means an average of about $40,000 less than market prices, which is likely below the actual cost of constructing the homes. To make up for the losses, developers have to sell the remaining 90 percent for more than they would otherwise.

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High Speed and Low Budgets

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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While it is possible that Spain’s train crash that killed some 80 people was due to a broken rail or other equipment failure, most experts looking at the video below think the problem was simply high speeds. The video shows a train going an estimated 125 mph around a corner designed for 50 mph.

Much attention has been focused on the train’s driver, who apparently has been known to post photos of train speedometers at high speeds (but not more than the speed limits), suggesting he might have been less than fully attentive. But where was the positive train control system, which should have warned the driver and automatically slowed the train if the driver failed to do so?

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