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More Phony Plaudits for Portland

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner is obviously not doing his job or Popular Science magazine would not have named Portland the nation’s “greenest city.” As befitting the “science” in its name, the magazine arrived at this conclusion quantitatively. But as befitting the “popular” in its name, it seems to have skewed the data to arrive at a predetermined outcome.

PopSci, which once featured fantastic visions of the future promising, among other things, propellor-driven automobiles, propellor-driven trains, and propellor-driven snowmobiles, now takes a grim view of the future that demands we all “green up” by reducing our mobility and energy consumption. The magazine relied on four criteria for its rankings: the percentage of electricity that comes from renewable resources, the percentage of workers who don’t drive, the number of buildings certified as “green,” and how comprehensive the city’s recycling program is. The first two were given twice the weight of the second two.

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Raleigh Rail Rises from the Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Two years ago, the idea of building a $1 billion rail system in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area died when the FTA said not enough people would ride it to justify federal funding. But now, a new proposal has been made to build a similar rail system, only this one would cost twice as much money for twice as many miles of rail.

Because, as everyone knows, if building 28 miles of rail line is a waste of money, then building 56 miles makes perfect sense.

Proponents are counting on getting a quarter of the money from Washington and a quarter from the state of North Carolina. Of course, at a mere $35 million a mile, $2 billion won’t be enough to build the proposed 56 miles of light rail, not when most light-rail lines are coming in at $50 million a mile. But they’ll worry about that later.

Who are the “experts” who came up with this plan? To give you a hint, the chair of the citizens advisory committee is a pathologist at Duke University. That certainly makes one eligible to be an amateur transit expert qualified to spend $2 billion of someone else’s money.

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Urban Planning “Saves” Another Neighborhood

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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At one time, Argay Terrace was a boring suburban neighborhood, housing middle-class families whose lives were so dull they didn’t even know they were missing the excitement of lively streets. Now, thanks to Portland’s urban planners, Argay has become a vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood that offers retail and service business so residents don’t have to drive to get everything they need.

“When I was in school,” says a local resident, “we used to call Argay Terrace ‘snob hill’ because that’s where all the rich kids lived.”
Photo by ORTEM.

Unfortunately, the retail and service businesses are drugs and prostitution, which have grown by almost 300 percent in the last four years alone. The streets today are so vibrant that longtime residents are afraid to walk around at night without a concealed weapon, and many strangely prefer a little less vibration and have moved out.

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Land-Use Regulation Makes Housing Expensive

By | | Regional planning
35 Comments

Land-use regulation has added $200,000 to the median price of Seattle homes, says Theo Eicher, an economist at the University of Washington. This is a little greater than the amount estimated by the Antiplanner, which was $180,000, but since the Antiplanner was being deliberately conservative, the numbers are remarkably close.

As described here, Eicher’s study relied on a recently released database of land-use regulation in 2,730 U.S. cities that was compiled by Joseph Gyourko of the Wharton Business School. Eicher compared housing prices from 2006 census data with regulation and showed there is a strong correlation between the two. Eicher was only able to look at 250 cities, because census data were not collected in all cities in the Wharton database. When the 2010 census is complete, an even more detailed study should be possible.

Originally built in the 1920s for $2,800 (without the second story, which was added later), this house recently sold for $650,000. According to economist Theo Eicher, more than $200,000 of that price is due to land-use regulation.
Flickr photo by brewbooks.

Eicher’s actual paper includes data for all 250 cities, 123 of which overlap with the Antiplanner’s data. His estimates of the costs of regulation tend to be a little higher than mine except in California, Florida, and a few other places where they are lower.

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Mustang Kicks Air Travelers

By | | Planning Disasters
12 Comments

The Denver International Airport (DIA), one of the 20th century’s great planning disasters, has been cursed with an angry blue mustang that threatens to stomp anyone who says anything bad about the airport. Built at a cost of $4.8 billion — $2 billion more than originally projected, the Denver airport is 25 miles from downtown Denver — or, as the locals say, halfway to Kansas.

Halfway to Kansas.
Flickr photo by thomas23.

DIA was such a bad idea that even the planners objected. I once found a document prepared by the Denver Regional Council of Governments predicting that the airport would be way to expensive, and to pay for it they would have to raise gate fees, which would cause Denver to lose one of its hub airlines. That is exactly what happened: rather than participate in this boondoggle, Continental moved its hub to Houston.

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Disenchanted with Conservation Easements

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner used to think that conservation easements were a great idea. Only 30 percent of the nation’s land is public, and easements provided a way to protect some of the remaining 70 percent from development.

But lately I’ve come to have my doubts. To get tax credits for easements, they have to be perpetual. And who are we to try to decide the fate of land for future generations? Just as it might be unwise to wantonly destroy something that people in the future might value, it could be similarly inappropriate to lock it up and throw away the key.

Is Colorado running out of open space?
Flickr photo by Gord McKenna.

In recent days, the Rocky Mountain News has documented some other abuses of the easement process:

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Here’s What’s Wrong with Bush & the Neocons

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
21 Comments

The Antiplanner is not too excited about the presidential primaries, which seem to be little more than a reality show for political activists. It certainly has kept them chattering about who will get thrown off the island for over a year. But it has also not only kept them from noticing how bad our government really is, they haven’t even noticed that nearly all the people running are the ones who were responsible for making it so bad.

Instead, we imprint our own images of how we think things ought to be on a candidate and then imagine how wonderful life would be if only our candidate were to get elected. If our candidate should happen to get elected, there will be plenty of scapegoats to blame things on when we fail to achieve nirvana. All of this has become greatly exaggerated now that election campaigns are lasting two full years.

Some may call me cynical, but as Lily Tomlin says, no matter how cynical you are, you can’t keep up.

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Congestion Is Our Friend?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation
31 Comments

Few planners are as outspoken about the need for urban congestion as Dom Nozzi, a senior planner in Gainesville, Florida. In Saturday’s Gainesville Sun, he writes about all the wonderful benefits congestion can produce:

1. A disincentive for sprawl
2. A reduction in pollution
3. A reduction in average car speeds
4. A healthier urban core
5. Political pressure for more transit and bike paths
6. Infill, mixed use, and higher density residential

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Make Mortgage Relief Conditional on Land-Use Reform

By | | News commentary
15 Comments

President Bush’s 2009 budget includes a proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on programs aimed at helping people avoid foreclosure on their homes. Although the programs are small and won’t help many of the people who are in trouble, any help at all sends the wrong signal: that you can borrow beyond your means and the feds will bail you out when you get in trouble.

But, as the Antiplanner has noted before, the real reason why many people bought houses that were more expensive than they could afford was that state and local land-use rules had driven up housing prices. So Heritage Foundation scholar Ron Utt has an idea: make mortgage relief conditional on deregulation of land use.

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