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Town and Country Dystopian Act

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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The United Kingdom has some of the least affordable housing of any country in the world, with median homes costing more than five times median incomes. In the United States, only California and Hawaii have less affordable housing. A new report estimates that the U.K. needs 4.3 million homes to restore affordability, but the country’s planning system prevents those homes from being built.

Click image to download a 5.1-MB PDF of this 65-page report.

The report, which is published by a think tank called Centre for Cities, correctly places the blame for the state of the country’s housing on the Town & Country Planning Act of 1947. This law took away development rights from every private landowner in the country and only allowed new development if it complied with local and regional land-use plans. Continue reading →

East Side Access Project Opens Today

By | | Transportation
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Today, more than a decade late and after spending $11.2 billion, the Long Island Railroad will begin running trains to Grand Central Terminal. This 3.5-mile project, known as the East Side Access tunnel, cost a mere $3.2 billion a mile, which is a trifle compared with the Second Avenue Subway, the next segment of which is expected to cost $4 billion a mile.

Architect’s vision of what new LIRR platform will look like in Grand Central Terminal. Source: STV Inc.

Meanwhile, New York transit has a $26.6 billion capital funding gap over the next two years. One result of this is that more than a quarter of the region’s transit vehicles are beyond the end of their expected service life. Continue reading →

Urbanization by State

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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The share of land in the United States that is urbanized grew from 2.90 percent in 2010 to 2.94 percent in 2020, according to data recently released by the Census Bureau showing how many square miles of land in each state was urbanized as of 2020. This can be compared with 2010 data and the total land area of each state to calculate what percentage had been urbanized in each of the two years.

Click image to download a 15.0-MB PDF of this map distinguishing urban from rural areas in 2020.

One reason why the growth was so small was that the Census Bureau redefined urban; under the old definition, any community of 2,500 people was urban; under the new definition, communities had to have 5,000 people or 2,000 residences. However, this only makes a small difference — perhaps 0.1 percent — because such communities are, by definition, small. Continue reading →

The Sovietization of Oregon

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A sweeping new housing bill is prancing its way through the Oregon legislature in the name of affordable housing. The bill would greatly reduce the rights of Oregon residents to have a say in the future of their neighborhoods. Instead, it would direct the state’s Office of Economic Analysis to set housing targets for all cities in the state with more than 10,000 residents, and those cities would have six to eight years to meet those targets no matter what the cost.

If House Bill 2889 passes, there may a place for you to live in Oregon as long as you don’t mind living in a tiny apartment in a place like this. Despite promises of affordability, it won’t be cheap unless it is subsidized: 537-square-foot apartments in this building rent for $1,425 a month. Photo from GBD.

When Oregon first passed its land-use regulations back in the 1970s, citizen involvement was the number one goal. Now, anyone who doesn’t think a giant apartment building should be built next their house is a NIMBY and probably a racist and should be ignored. Continue reading →

Next Up: Gas Rationing

By | | Transportation
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Monday’s Antiplanner noted that Oxford England has set a goal of reducing driving by 25 percent and observed that, “No city in the developed world has been able to reduce driving by this much since World War II.” I didn’t want to give anyone any ideas, so I didn’t add that driving fell during World War II due to gas rationing.

A rationing coupon issued to a resident of Lowell, Oregon, who owned a 1934 Plymouth.

Too late: when I wrote that, I wasn’t aware that, just the day before, a journal called Ethics, Policy and the Environment had published an article arguing in favor of gas rationing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors claim that this would be a “fairer way to fight climate change.” Continue reading →

The Future of Working at Home

By | | News commentary
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Employers are increasingly demanding that remote workers return to offices or other workplaces. Some are offering bonuses and pay increases to return to work while others are threatening to fire employees who don’t return.

Click image to download a copy of this report.

Employers such as Disney argue that the creative work they want out of their employees requires collaboration that can only be found when employees are working together. Others say that working in one location creates a work culture that is vital to the success of their companies. Continue reading →

The 15-Minute Conspiracy

By | | Transportation
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Oxford, England, wants to be a 15-minute city and towards that end it is creating low-traffic neighborhoods where only certain people will be allowed to drive automobiles. This has generated huge protests by people who claim this is limiting their freedom to travel.

Slate argues that this is all a misunderstanding; 15-minute cities are “not [about] stopping people from traveling more, but making it possible for them to travel less.” But if they are so benign, then why do Antifa thugs need to disguise themselves so they can’t be identified in case they happen to destroy anyone’s property when engaging in a counterprotest? Continue reading →

Re-Imagining Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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A recent op-ed in the Baltimore Sun written by several elected officials proposes to “re-imagine public transit” in the Baltimore area. In particular, they want to revive the Red Line, a light-rail line that was cancelled in 2015. Among the strikes against it were that it would increase congestion and would carry so few passengers that, under FTA rules at the time, it wasn’t cost-effective and therefore wasn’t eligible for federal funding. (The rules have since been changed, but that doesn’t make it any more cost effective.)

Imagining the Baltimore Red Line.

The fact that Maryland’s governor approved the DC-area Purple Line at the same time as he cancelled the Red Line has stuck in the craw of Baltimore transit officials. Since then, the Purple Line has suffered numerous delays and cost overruns, but that doesn’t worry Baltimore’s mayor and the county executives who wrote this op-ed. Heck, they probably see cost overruns as a good thing as they would bring more money into their communities. Continue reading →

Failing to See the Forest for the Trees

By | | Transportation
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New York University’s Transit Costs Project has issued its final report on why it costs so much to build transit infrastructure in the United States. While some of the answers appear reasonable at first glance, the report suffers from the researchers not asking the right questions.

Click image to download a 26.4-MB PDF of this report.

In its review of Boston’s Green Line, the report notes that “Understaffed agencies lacking experience with large capital construction projects struggle to manage consultants.” One result is less than half the costs of the project went into construction; the rest went to pay consultants. We’ve seen that happen with Honolulu and other rail projects as well. Continue reading →

The Value of VMT

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, there was a mindset among urban planners that driving was bad and the ultimate goal of all of their policies was to reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). That’s why they wanted to build obsolete urban transit systems like light rail and streetcars instead of freeways. That’s why they wanted more people to live in high-density housing projects instead of low-density suburbs. That’s why they wanted to reduce the amount of parking available to residents, shoppers, and others.

Photograph by B137.

So far, the pandemic has not awakened them to the folly of this mindset. Driving has fully recovered and in much of the country people are driving more miles than ever, while transit is little more than half what it was. Instead of acknowledging these changes, cities and regions are writing plans that never mention the pandemic and relying on pre-pandemic data to justify their policies. Continue reading →