Search Results for: plan bay area

Property Rights and the New Feudalism

By | | Regional planning
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The war in Ukraine has forced people of the “West”—a term that has come to mean most of Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand—to confront a social system that we have pretended went extinct hundreds of years ago: feudalism. While feudalism has mostly disappeared from the above-named nations, it is thriving in Putin’s Russia, as well as many other places around the world.

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

“Broadly defined,” says Wikipedia, feudalism “was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor.” A classic example is when William, the Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066. Prior to the conquest, people in England could buy and sell land, a system left over from when the Roman Empire ruled Britain.

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Americans Fleeing Dense Cities & Suburbs

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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Americans are leaving the cities. Between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York City lost 305,000 residents. Los Angeles County lost nearly 160,000. Cook County, home of Chicago, lost nearly 90,000. San Francisco lost nearly 55,000. The counties in which Boston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington are located each lost well over 20,000. Collectively, the counties containing 26 of the nation’s 33 largest cities lost nearly 900,000 residents.

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

Changes in population in 2021 are particularly revealing because the nation’s overall population hardly grew that year. The Census Bureau estimates that 2021 numbers were only 0.1 percent greater than in 2020, the slowest growth rate since the nation began. Thus, local population changes mainly reflect people’s preferences about where they want to live, not birth rates or foreign immigration. Continue reading →

Old Technologies for New Starts

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As part of the president’s proposed 2023 budget, the Federal Transit Administration plans to give out an unprecedented $4.45 billion on new transit capital projects, sometimes called New Starts and Small Starts. For comparison, in 2022 it gave away less than $2.5 billion. The difference, of course, is due to passage of the infrastructure law, which massively increased federal subsidies to transit.

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

This increase in spending and the projects that the FTA proposes to fund demonstrate that neither the transit industry nor the legislators funding it are responding to changes resulting from the recent pandemic. Transit was already declining before the pandemic, and the pandemic led to a much larger decline, much of which is likely to be permanent. Transit’s response to the decentralization of downtowns and cities should be to rely on smaller vehicles. Yet the New Starts proposals all presume that downtown job numbers and transit ridership will rapidly grow and thus more spending and larger vehicles are needed to accommodate that growth. Continue reading →

Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies that have been gobbling up billions of dollars of subsidies each year are now facing the prospect that hardly anyone wants to ride transit even with the subsidies. A Wall Street Journal story focuses on commuter-rail lines, which in January carried less than 35 percent of pre-pandemic riders. However, commuter-bus lines are even worse, carrying only 27 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Loudoun County commuter buses carried less than 6 percent as many passengers to DC in January 2022 as they did in January 2020. Photo by Virginia Department of Transportation.

Individually, the worst-performing rail line is the Minneapolis North Star commuter train, which carried only 7 percent of pre-pandemic riders in January. Maryland and Virginia commuter trains serving DC, the Altamont and CalTrains commuter trains in the Bay Area, and commuter trains in Chicago and Seattle all carried less than 20 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while trains in Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Connecticut were just over 20 percent. Meanwhile, commuter-bus lines in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Charlotte, Austin, and Sacramento all carried less than 10 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

Measuring Housing Affordability

By | | Housing
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Vancouver, BC, had the least affordable housing in North America in 2021, according to Wendell Cox’s latest International Housing Affordability report. The median home price in Vancouver was 13.3 times the median household income, which means almost no one can really afford to buy a home. According to Zillow, condos typically sell for around a million dollars while single-family homes sell for $3 million to $6 million. Yes, those are Canadian dollars, but still unaffordable.

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Vancouver was followed by San Jose, whose median home prices were 12.6 times median incomes, and San Francisco, at 11.8. Vancouver was exceeded by Sydney, Australia, at 15.3, and Hong Kong, at a stunning 23.2. As Cox takes pains to point out, all of the most-expensive housing markets are in areas with urban-growth boundaries, greenbelts, or other containment policies. Continue reading →

Won’t Anyone Stop This Ridiculous Project?

By | | Transportation
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Less than a month ago, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its latest business plan admitting that its previous cost estimates were too low. Now the agency has released an even newer document admitting that the cost of building the line from California’s Central Valley to the Bay Area will be 40 percent more than estimated in the business plan.

Click image to go to download page for this environmental impact report.

This latest document is an environmental impact statement that is literally thousands of pages long. It reveals, among many other things, that constructing this segment of the line will release close to 400 million kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere. It claims that this cost will be quickly repaid by the savings from reduced CO2 emissions once the trains are operating, but that’s based on unrealistically high ridership projections along with the assumption that neither automobiles nor airplanes will ever be more energy efficient or climate friendly than they were a few years ago. No doubt the state spent millions of dollars on this poorly reasoned document. Continue reading →

Transit Crime Rates on the Rise

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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After a woman died when she was shoved in front of a subway train in January, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced a major action plan aimed at reducing transit crimes. The weekend following his announcement, at least six people were stabbed on the subway system. A few days after that, a woman was robbed and her skull fractured after being struck with a hammer in a New York subway station. A few hours later, a man was stabbed in the neck at a Brooklyn subway station and someone set fire to a shopping cart in a station in the Bronx.

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New York is not the only transit system to be suffering from violent crimes. Last month, a man was shot to death on the San Francisco BART system. BART had seen violent crimes more than double in the years before the pandemic, and crime numbers remained high after the pandemic began. Continue reading →

BART Outlook Grim Because Managers Dim

By | | Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.

BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.

In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years. Continue reading →

America’s Rising Housing Prices

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Now is a great time to sell a home, but a terrible time to buy one. According to the St. Louis Fed, median home prices in the United States have risen by 25 percent since the pandemic began in December 2019, which is probably more than any two-year period in history. Even after adjusting for inflation, prices in many markets are higher today than they were at the peak of the mid-2000s housing bubble.

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This increase is due to a combination of labor shortages and supply-chain issues. Unlike the housing bubble, these issues are affecting all housing markets, not just those beset by anti-sprawl growth-management planning. Indeed, prices in some places without any growth management have risen more than in some places with strict growth-management regulations. Continue reading →

How Cato Sold Out California Property Owners

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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In September, 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill abolishing single-family zoning. This bill was a victory for the Yes in Other People’s Back Yards (YIOPBY) movement, as well as for urban planners who sought to densify California urban areas, which are already the densest in the nation.

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

It was also a victory for the Cato Institute, which was proud of the fact that it was working hand-in-hand with left-wing groups that sought to force Californians to live in ways in which they didn’t want to live. Cato’s work was led by Michael Tanner, whose previous experience with housing issues was nearly nil. In supporting this movement, Cato and Tanner ignored everything I had written in two books and seven policy papers for Cato over the previous fourteen years. Continue reading →