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Make America Affordable Again

By | | Policy brief
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The Department of Housing and Urban Development has asked for comments on eliminating regulatory barriers to affordable housing. This is my response.

Fifty years ago, housing was affordable everywhere in the country. The 1970 census found that the statewide ratio of median home prices to median family incomes was greater than 3.0 only in Hawaii (where it was 3.04). Price-to-income ratios were under 2.5 in every other state, and under 2.2 in California, New York, and other states that today are considered unaffordable.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

A home that costs three times a family’s income is considered affordable because (depending on mortgage interest rates) the family can generally pay off a mortgage on that home in 15 years. When the home is four times the income, it can take 30 years, while families cannot pay off a conventional mortgage on a home that is five times their income. Higher home prices also mean higher down payments, which make housing even more unaffordable. Housing is in crisis today because price-to-income ratios have risen above 5.0 in California, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia, and above 4.0 in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington (calculated from tables B19113 and B25077 of the 2018 American Community Survey). Continue reading →

The Year in Review

By | | Follow up, Housing, Transportation
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The Antiplanner tends to agree with Dilbert that New Year’s is a random calendar date, but everyone else is looking back at 2018, probably because it provides a good excuse for a blog post. From my point of view, the two most important events of 2018 were the continuing decline of transit ridership and urban planners’ latest victory in their battles against single-family homes.

November ridership data will be out in a few days, and December a month after that, but October data show that year-over-year ridership fell in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York subways were recovering from major delays due to repairs in July 2017. Over the last decade, annual ridership in some urban areas has fallen by nearly 50 percent, and it has fallen by more than 15 percent in more than half of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas.

While some of the decline is due to increasingly unreliable rail systems in New York, Washington, and a few other cities, most of it is due to factors beyond transit agency control: the growth of ride hailing, the growth of other alternatives such as electric scooters, and the growing affordability of driving as oil prices remain low. The question isn’t whether transit will recover; it is whether it will be able to survive at all, especially outside of New York City and the six other cities (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington) where transit still makes a difference in the day-to-day life of the average resident. Continue reading →

Turning Portland into San Francisco

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A couple of decades ago, the planning mantra in Oregon was “don’t turn Portland into Los Angeles,” meaning don’t make it more congested. So planners were a bit chagrinned to discover that their plans actually aimed to turn Portland into Los Angeles (see p. 7), meaning a dense urban area (L.A. is the densest in the nation) with a low number of freeway miles per capita (L.A. has the lowest of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas). Since then, Portland-area congestion (measured in hours of delay per commuter) has reached the Los Angeles’ 1985 level.

Today, the mantra is “don’t turn Portland into San Francisco,” meaning an extremely unaffordable housing market. So it should be no surprise that Portland planners are following exactly the policies that will turn Portland into San Francisco.

“We have a crisis of housing affordability in this city,” says Portland Mayor Hales. But expanding the urban-growth boundary is not the answer, he claims. “It’s not true that new housing at the edge is affordable,” he argues. “Maybe it once was when there was cheap land, cheap money and cheap transportation. That’s not true anymore.” Yes, but the reason it isn’t true is the urban-growth boundary. Get rid of the boundary and associated planning restrictions, and vacant land becomes cheap, and new homes built on the urban fringe will cost a lot less. In turn, that will force prices down throughout the city and region.

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California Housing Is Expensive

By | | Housing
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The Wall Street Journal observes that high housing costs are hurting the California economy. This brilliant conclusion is based on a report by Mac Taylor of the state legislative analyst’s office. Unfortunately, the report misses a few important details and as a result comes to entire the wrong conclusion.

Housing is expensive, the report says, because California isn’t building enough of it. Well, duh. Why isn’t it building enough? According to the report, it’s because there is a “limited amount of vacant developable land.” The solution, the report concludes, is to build higher densities in the land that is available.

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American Dream Presentations

By | | Mission
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Of the more than 30 presentations given at the 2014 Preserving the American Dream conference in Denver this past weekend, 18 used PowerPoint shows, all of which are downloadable below. A complete agenda shows when each presentation was given.

PowerPoint Presentations

Session 1: Debate Over Tolls and Public/Private Partnerships

Robert Poole: The Case for Tolls and PPPs

Greg Cohen: The Case Against Tolls and PPPs

Session 2: Transportation

Christian Holter: Struggles and Successes of Private Transit in America

Session 2a: Transportation Issues

Alan Pisarski: Where Is VMT Going?

Marc Scribner: The Future of Automobility

Session 2b: Transportation Finance

Baruch Feigenbaum: The TIGER Program–Discretionary Grant or Political Tool?

Session 2c: Data Workshop

Wendell Cox: Urban Data (10 MB)

Session 3: Land-Use Issues

Wendell Cox: Britain’s Declining House Sizes (13 MB)

Session 3a: Sustainability vs. Freedom

Rick Harrison: Sustainable Suburban Development Can Defeat Social Engineering (108 MB)

Thomas Wambolt: Problems with TIF

Session 3b: Fighting Sustainability Plans

Mark Gotz: Fighting Southern Florida’s Seven-50 Plan (14.1 MB)

Video on slide 9 of Mark’s show (12 MB)

Peter Singleton: Fighting Plan Bay Area

Session 3c: How to Review Transportation Plans

Thomas Rubin: How to Review a Transit Plan (10.8 MB)
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Randal O’Toole: How to Review a Regional Transportation Plan (19 MB)

Session 5b: Getting out the Message

Sharon Nassett: Stopping Wasteful Projects Through Citizen Advocacy

John Anthony: Shattering America’s Trance (2.0 MB)

Jim Karlock: How to Make YouTube Videos

Mimi Steel: Fighting a Plan After It Has Been Approved (5.1 MB)

Videos associated with Mimi Steel’s presentation (107 MB).

Size not shown for files smaller than 2 megabytes.

Supplemental Papers

Marc Scribner on Regulation of Self-Driving Vehicles

Which Way for the Highway Trust Fund

Emily Goff on Bringing Transportation Decisions Closer to the People: Why States and Localities Should Have More Control

Tom Rubin on Strategy for Preparation of NEPA/CEQA Administrative Record

Selling the Northwest Passage, an article about a proposed third bridge across the Columbia River

Survey of St. Johns-Lombard about transportation issues

A Line in the Sand, an article about Sharon Nasset and the Columbia River Crossing

Interesting Data (Excel Files)

Most of the files below are from the 2012 American Community Survey, a Census Bureau survey of more than 3 million households. Some of the files for urbanized areas may not include data for smaller urban areas because the sample size wasn’t large enough for statistical accuracy.

How people with no cars get to work by urbanized area

How people with no cars get to work by state

How people get to work by income class by state

Median home price to median family income ratio by urbanized area

Median home price to median family income ratio by state

This spreadsheet is a summary of the 2012 National Transit Database, which includes data for nearly all transit agencies and modes in the nation. An Antiplanner post explains most of the rows and columns in the 1.8-MB spreadsheet.

Obama: A Threat to Freedom & Prosperity

By | | Housing, News commentary
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The Obama Administration hates wealth and success. That’s the only explanation for recent actions it has taking to bring down those who are wealthy and successful.

First, the administration is plundering J.P. Morgan of $13 billion, partly for actions taken by Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, financial institutions that went broke and which J.P. Morgan took over as a favor to the federal government. These fines are for things WAMU and Bear Stearns did that no one thought were illegal at the time. The Obama administration has effectively made them retroactively illegal and fined a company that hadn’t engaged in similar activities itself. Normally, when a bank goes broke, the government asked another bank to take over so that people don’t lose access to their savings. Good luck convincing a bank to do that now. As J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says, “A Bear Stearns deal would not happen again that way, we simply wouldn’t undertake it.”

Second, the administration has charged Apple for acting as a monopoly price fixer for selling ebooks at certain prices. Never mind that Apple was entering an already competitive textbook market and offering to sell ebooks for far less than its competitors sell hard-copy books. The judge in the case has appointed as an inquisitor someone who has no experience in antitrust law, but is charging Apple more than $1,000 an hour to go through its books and question its employees.

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Outlawing Backyards

By | | Regional planning
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The Washington Times published an article yesterday charging that “climate crusaders want to phase out the American dream of a house and yard.” Focusing on Plan Bay Area, the article argues that single-family homes are hardly a threat to the planet.

“Phasing out backyards”–that’s a good phrase. Why didn’t I think of that?

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal observes that federal regulators condescend to “approve” of cars that drive themselves” (if the link hits a paywall, search for “Regulators Back Efforts to Develop Cars That Drive Themselves”). The article cautions that such cars won’t be available “until about 2025,” but Forbes is more optimistic, saying they will be available “before the end of the decade.”

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Recent Presentations

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner gave a presentation on property rights in Ottawa on Saturday, September 14, and a presentation on Plan Bay Area in Novato on Tuesday, September 17. The Ottawa presentation is downloadable as an 11.6-MB PDF. The Bay Area presentation is downloadable as a 16-MB PDF or a 57-MB zip file containing the PowerPoint show plus two Click on cialis no prescription more information now and be a man again. All the medicines are named as prescription cialis for getting over the issue of erectile dysfunction. Regular use of purchase generic levitra these herbal supplements offers effective cure for sexual disorders and keeps you in good health. Potential causes of this abnormal condition in which gentile of male cannot viagra without prescription canada retain its erection and plays a key role in making one impotent. videos of driverless cars.

Any one is free to distribute, use, or borrow from these presentations. I make every effort to use photographs that are in the public domain or under a creative commons license, but may have accidentally included some that are copyrighted, so it is best to try to find the photo’s origin before publishing the photos.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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Tomorrow, the Antiplanner is flying to Ottawa to participate in a conference on property rights. After that, I’ll fly to San Francisco to speak twice on Tuesday, September 17.

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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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