Search Results for: plan bay area

One-Acre Lots? Horrors!

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
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The city of Tualatin, a suburb of Portland, zoned about 300 acres of land within its borders in a low-density zone allowing 1 to 6 homes per acre. This raises the specter of up to 300 new homes on one-acre lots, a notion that is sending regional planners into fits.

“We don’t enjoy getting into this type of confrontation,” says planning professor and Metro councilor Carl Hosticka. But “it’s not fair to the other jurisdictions,” meaning the ones the complied with high-density housing goals set by Metro, Portland’s regional planning authority.

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High-Speed Rail Part 7: The Benefits of California HSR

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The costs are exorbitant and rising. The risks are staggering. And the benefits? Even if you believe the Authority’s optimistic assumptions, you pretty much need a magnifying glass to see them.

What are the benefits claimed for the rail network? Less traffic congestion, less energy consumption, less air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, economic development, and, of course, saving people’s time.

Congestion: With or without rail, the EIS predicts that highway congestion will be far worse in 2020 than it is today. With rail, highways parallel to the rail lines will have an average of 3.8 percent less traffic than if rail is not built (p. 3.1-12). Rail will do most on the L.A. to San Diego route (which will probably be one of the last segments to be built), taking 7.9 percent of cars off the road. It will remove 6.6 percent of cars on the Bay Area-to-Central Valley portion. Elsewhere the relief will be less than 3.5 percent.

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High-Speed Rail Part 6: The Risks of California HSR

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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Yesterday’s post on the costs of California high-speed rail discussed the likelihood that this megaproject will cost more than projected and the likelihood that taxpayers who pay for construction will have to pay again to rebuild the system every thirty or so years. Such costs are not so much a risk as a certainty. But there are many other risks involved with high-speed rail, some of which could unexpectedly drive up construction costs even more, and others affecting operations.

Some of these risks were identified in the senate oversight report on high-speed rail, including right-of-way, safety, and ridership risks. One important rish that was not brought out by the senate report is the risk that competing technologies will render high-speed rail obsolete.

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High-Speed Rail Part 5: The Cost of California HSR

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The California High-Speed Rail Authority wants to build an 800-mile rail network between Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, and (via Riverside) San Diego. Electrically-powered trains would travel over this network at speeds up to 220 miles per hour, allowing people to get from downtown San Francisco to downtown L.A. in about 2-1/2 hours.

It isn’t clear to me why any self-respecting San Franciscan would want to get to downtown L.A. in 2-1/2 hours, though I can imagine why they would want to quickly return. I suppose the Northern-Southern California cultural divide works both ways. But the four big questions are: How much will it cost? What kind of risks are involved? What are the likely benefits? And what are the alternatives? Today’s post will focus on cost.

By any measure, California high-speed rail will be a megaproject, the most expensive public-works project ever planned by a single U.S. state. Exactly how much it will cost is still uncertain — estimates published in various places have varied over a wide range. Just as uncertain is who is going to pay that cost. What is certain is that the $9.95 billion in bonds (of which $9 billion is for high-speed rail and $0.95 billion is for connecting transit improvements) that California voters will decide upon this November will be little more than a down payment.

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Most Overpriced Zip Codes?

By | | News commentary
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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