Search Results for: plan bay area

Most Overpriced Zip Codes?

By | | News commentary
27 Comments

The Antiplanner grew up in the Rose City Park neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, zip code 97213, so it is with some pride that I read that Forbes magazine has declared 97213 to be one of the 10 most overpriced zip codes in the U.S. Forbes considers housing overpriced when the monthly mortgage you would have to pay to buy a house is significantly more than the rent for that house. Since few houses are for sale and for rent at the same time, as a proxy, Forbes divides the median home price by the median annual rent on homes with the same number of bedrooms in a zip code.

Frankly, this is just another effort by Forbes to get you to watch one of their advertisement-laden slide shows. So, to save you the time, here are the magazine’s rankings of the 10 most overpriced zip codes:

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Urban Renewal: Time to Declare Victory and Go Home

By | | Planning Disasters
18 Comments

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an urban renewal project that began in the City’s Fillmore District in 1948 is about to sunset. The City’s web site claims the project “has set the stage for the rebirth of a rich and vibrant street life.”

But the director of the City’s Redevelopment Agency tells the Chronicle a different story. “The agency’s time there has not been a happy story,” he says. The little good that has happened in recent years is not “making up for the damage that was done in the early days.”

San Francisco’s Western Addition, of which the Fillmore District is a part. Some of the apartments in the foreground were no doubt built on the sites of former Victorian homes.
Flickr photo by pbo31.

California passed an urban-renewal law in 1945 giving cities the authority to clear out “blighted” areas. Cities were allowed to determine whether a neighborhood was blighted by, among other things, the percentage of non-white people who lived in the neighborhood. The Fillmore District was 60 percent black, ergo it was blighted.

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Smart and Dumb at VTA

By | | News commentary, Transportation
19 Comments

San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has announced that it will start a bus-rapid transit service from Santa Clara to Alum Rock. This was originally supposed to be a light-rail line projected to cost nearly $400 million. As bus-rapid transit, it will cost only $128 million. The light-rail line would not open until 2021; BRT will begin in 2012. Light rail would operate every 15 minutes; BRT every six. BRT was also projected to attract nearly three times as many riders at a lower operating cost than light rail.

Has sanity somehow struck the nation’s worst-managed transit agency? Apparently not, for VTA also looks set to ask voters for a 1/8-cent sales tax to pay for a BART line to San Jose. This sales tax would raise the $42 million per year that VTA estimates it needs just to operate this line. Actual construction — the cost of which is now estimated to be well over $6 billion — would have to be funded out of other money.

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Nature Equals Disease

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
10 Comments

Almost every forester I’ve ever met, even ones who work for environmental groups, believes that forests “need” to be thinned. Not just some forests; virtually all forests. Take a forester and show him or her a natural forest, or even one that has been thinned but not in the last ten or so years, and they will invariably say, “This forest needs thinning.”

Is this forest “diseased and in poor health”?

At one time, these foresters argued that thinnings boosted the economic value of the trees. The trees that would be left behind would grow faster. Because you can cut more lumber out of a bigger tree, a few bigger trees are more valuable than many small trees.

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Disneyland for Yuppies

By | | News commentary
47 Comments

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that San Francisco’s middle class is leaving, priced out of the housing market. Unfortunately, they got the reason for it wrong.

Click for a larger version. Flickr photo by (nz)dave.

“The trend of well-heeled and upwardly mobile young professionals moving into cities across the country, drawn by a newfound affection for the amenities of urban life, is by now well documented. It’s led to many benefits: Cities are revitalizing aging downtowns with new buildings and businesses, people are walking and using transit instead of making long commutes in polluting autos,” says the Chronicle. “But it’s also been putting pressure on housing prices for existing stock and, many argue, steering much of the new development toward the high end.”

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Let’s Talk about Gentrification

By | | City planning, News commentary
38 Comments

The New York Times has a love affair with Portland, but a recent article points to a dark side of Portland that the Antiplanner has commented on before: it is (as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser once put it) a “boutique city catering only to a small, highly educated elite.”

That means there isn’t much room in Portland for chronically low-income blacks. The black “ghetto,” as we called parts of Northeast Portland when I was growing up there, has been gentrified by yuppies who can’t afford homes elsewhere in the region’s urban-growth boundary. This has pushed blacks from rental housing in those neighborhoods, leaving just a scattering of blacks who owned their homes.

What is left “is not drug infested, but then you say, ‘Well, what happened to all the black people that were in this area?’ ” Margaret Solomon, a long-time black resident told the Times. “You don’t see any.” As California writer Joseph Perkins put it, “smart growth is the new Jim Crow.”

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Franchises vs. Corporatism

By | | Why Planning Fails
6 Comments

The term public-private partnerships, often abbreviated PPP, has come to include two very different arrangements. One arrangement, which I prefer to call franchises, has proven very successful. Advocates of the other arrangement, which I shall call corporatism because the name I prefer is too emotion-laden, are riding on the coattails of the success of franchises.

The Antiplanner discussed this subject six months ago. But the topic has come up in the comments so it is worth repeating.

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Where Did Transit Ridership Grow in 2006?

By | | Transportation
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I’ve played with the 2006 transit data (previously) some more. The summary file now breaks down trips and passenger miles in each urban area by the main modes: buses, trolley buses, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail.

I then transcribed these numbers to my rail transit data file, which includes data from all rail urban areas dating back to 1982. This file also includes miles of driving, but the Federal Highway Administration hasn’t published 2006 data yet. The file also lists the number of route miles of each form of rail transit, but I wasn’t able to interpret the “fixed guideway” file that came with the 2006 data, so I didn’t fill these numbers in for many cities.

Still, we now can compare trends in transit ridership and passenger miles in the various rail cities. Here are the results.

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Subways Going Down the Tubes

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

Rail advocates sometimes claim that we can ignore the high cost of building rail lines, because “once they are built, they are there forever.” Yes, forever, or about 30 to 40 years, whichever comes first.

Which is why the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), Washington Metro, and Chicago Transit authority are all looking at roughly $10 billion each in rehabilitation expenses in the next few years, little of which is funded. Of the three, BART is in the best shape, saying it needs $11 billion for rehab, slightly less than half of which is funded. The remaining $5.8 billion is still a lot of money just to keep the system going.

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Conference in San Jose

By | | Housekeeping
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Posts will be light this week as the Antiplanner is helping the American Dream Coalition put on its annual Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose this weekend.

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