neat urban planning stuff

"Nathaniel Baum-Snow, an economist at Brown University, has documented that each new federally-funded ?highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent.??

I thought I would check some numbers and see how Portland, Maine's population compared pre and post interstate. Sure enough, using rough figures, the decline was 17.9%

That is very interesting. Thanks for posting.
 
Shepard said:
Today's globe:
Why, if this article appeared in the NYT, would these comments not be expected to follow? Why can't we have a respectable newspaper that prints thoughtful op-eds for a thoughtful and responsive readership?
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Because this is New England. Many people outside of the city are uneducated low class backwards thinking conservatives. True, not all are, but many are.
 
Why aren't there any brilliant, charismatic speakers and writers that argue in favor of urban policy? I think that the number one way to get these "uneducated low class backwards thinking conservatives" to understand the folly of suburbs and the potential of cities is a speaker like Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, or any other of the many leaders regarded as being incredibly influential with an audience. People like Al Gore and James Howard Kunstler just piss the opponents off.
 
And my god, some of the logic these people go by is absolutely atrocious! "Count the on and off ramps in the cities vs. the country, who do you think these roads are built for..." and so on.
 
Kunstler pisses this proponent off, as well.

And besides wouldn't any brilliant, charismatic speaker or writer just be another ivory tower elitist snob, with their communiss train systems and unpatriotic small building lots.
 
If he (or she, of course) was a truly excellent speaker, he would not be interpreted as such. If the intention was to appeal to the average person, they would come off to their audience as an average person, their buddy, albeit, an incredibly well versed average buddy. Convince them in their own terms why cities are better than suburbs.
 
Good luck inspiring anyone to a smaller house and to walking through the rain to a tram instead of having a car. "Sacrifice for the greater good" hasn't inspired anyone since WWII, and never inspired anyone to make a permanent change. Even making the obvious connection between greater oil consumption and US involvement in the Middle East didn't get many people to stop driving

Why, if this article appeared in the NYT, would these comments not be expected to follow?
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NYT comments are heavily moderated to maintain the quality of the site. You can't just post anything there.
 
There are several federal policies that encourage home ownership and are therefore, consequently, anti urban. You don't have to convince the common folk (the hoi polloi or masses) in the own language or vocabulary, you just have to convince the people who control federal policy (aka congress members who, by and large, are more educated than average, with some exceptions) because if policy changes this will be communicated in the universal language (no, not English) - money. George Bush did a very good job at what Kennedy refers to as speaking to people in plain language (minus the well versed bit). It is important to be an orator when running for office, but once in control you simply need to speak dollars and cents/sense to those around you with whom you share power. Get these people to spoon feed policy shifts back to their constituencies until enough political support can be garnered to abort current housing subsidies (80% of federal money spent on housing goes into allowing mortgage interest deductions from federal taxes). The move to the suburbs is not just a personal choice, it is encouraged at the federal level, and now that we are seeing some of this encouragement's pitfalls things will change. The issue is how and at what rate. Obama seems more interested in urban communities than perhaps any recent president, so maybe he's the guy you were looking for.

also, as a note about my previous comment, it is quite possible as well that the educated speakers and writers you long for at the Globe's online comment section do exist, but they simply self select themselves out of the comment pool. Perhaps they are running companies or otherwise more productively engaged than verbally barfing in the online comments section which, for some less gainfully employed people, is somewhat more of an option during the day.
 
Why is "homeownership" necessarily anti-urban? I own an urban condo which makes me more invested in my community, more invested in public transit, etc.
 
It doesn't have to be but if the numbers in that article are true, most owner-occupied homes in the US are suburban and most rentals are urban. You would need to convert a lot of rental units to condos to even out the distribution.
 
statler said:
It doesn't have to be but if the numbers in that article are true, most owner-occupied homes in the US are suburban and most rentals are urban. You would need to convert a lot of rental units to condos to even out the distribution.
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Exactly, Statler.

It doesn't have to be, but it is. I should have articulated myself better.
 
Oh thank god, anything to stop the endless hallelujah chorus for Portland.
 
Hmmm. Interesting. Thanks for posting. The difficult thing about land use policy is that depending on which way you look at things, and what you value more, there can almost always be an effective argument made in favor of or against a particular approach. I think the focus needs to be on transportation (i.e. eliminating dependence of the car, say through eliminating its convenience...like no parking spaces, for example) which would have a secondary effect of drawing its own urban growth boundary. Without cars, development would take place sort of like it does within a UGB (see eastern cities' historical cores) and the higher housing prices wouldn't be artificial. That's how things have always been (perhaps with the exception of the industrial revolution) and if anything the car has in many ways made suburban land economics, and the prices of land it dictates, artificial; the UGB is just trying to restore the balance.
 
"The difficult thing about land use policy is that depending on which way you look at things, and what you value more, there can almost always be an effective argument made in favor of or against a particular approach."

Yes. Cox poses himself as an activist against land use regulation, though he only tends to argue against regulation that produces environments he doesn't like for whatever reason (it seems personal at times) ... that said his criticisms of Portland do get at some of the most significant problems with UGBs.
 
Wendell Cox is a conservative who has a personal vendetta against Portland. I'd prefer to see the place fall by the hipsters' own sword. Watch their reaction as much less cool places surpass it in terms of their own standards of livability.

"So you want to live in a city that's friendly for biking, huh? Why aren't you living in Minneapolis? Oh right, the people who drink PBR in plaid there aren't doing it ironically."
 
Minneapolis is a pretty cool place too, but I doubt that I'd want to bike there for 6 months of the year.
 
a630 said:
"The difficult thing about land use policy is that depending on which way you look at things, and what you value more, there can almost always be an effective argument made in favor of or against a particular approach."

Yes. Cox poses himself as an activist against land use regulation, though he only tends to argue against regulation that produces environments he doesn't like for whatever reason (it seems personal at times) ... that said his criticisms of Portland do get at some of the most significant problems with UGBs.
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yes the criticism does get at some of the most significant issues of UGBs and other growth management systems, but to what extent can we really call them problems? Might it be that increases in housing costs reflect the value to consumers of the amenities created or disamenities prevented by growth management (as suggested by William A. Fischel in his report 'Do Growth Controls Matter?' from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)?

Consider the following argument: it would only make sense to actively pursue a policy if it had benefits. UGBs and other growth management policies, then, must be implemented in pursuit of some benefits (say, avoiding sprawl and protecting the environment, easing commuted and fostering the vibrancy that comes from dense and walkable communities). Okay, that seems plausible. Now, assume the policies pursued are actually successful (which would make sense given their continued existence). Alright, so we have a motive for pursuing the policies (benefits), the policies actually work (successful in producing benefits), so what can we expect? In a market economy, which the U.S. is for all intents and purposes operating as, we should expect to see exactly what has happened. As UGBs succeed, the attractiveness of central areas increase, and people are willing to pay more to live and own there. Bidding increases and the highest bidder wins, thus pushing up market prices by increasing demand. Its sort of like gentrification on a major scale. a place starts to look better, people want to live there more, and then prices skyrocket. Is this a problem? It really depends on your frame of reference. For gentrifying areas, the argument can be made that the very character that led artists and others to take advantage of low rents and convenient inner city access is being eroded as retirees and other well to do families price the less well healed out of the market and fundamentally change the atmosphere. The same cannot be said about UGBs and growth management, though, because such policies have as their motivating purpose the alteration of an area, not its perpetuation. Growth management policies are implemented to address problems; gentrification occurs because of an area's inherent attractiveness to begin with. So although similar in effect and outcome, I think the implications of the two phenomena are wildly different. Just my thoughts.
 
Patrick said:
yes the criticism does get at some of the most significant issues of UGBs and other growth management systems, but to what extent can we really call them problems? Might it be that increases in housing costs reflect the value to consumers of the amenities created or disamenities prevented by growth management (as suggested by William A. Fischel in his report 'Do Growth Controls Matter?' from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)?

Well yes, it is a problem. Fischel's arguments work best at the local level, assuming the Tiebout scenario where other municipalities will deliver another set of goods, so that people who do not want (or cannot afford) the benefits of the more exclusive jurisdiction can go to another one, and there is no net negative impact. Sometimes I think Fischel forgets there are poor, hell middle class, people. Fortunately for Portland, if you don't want to pay the price for those amenities (which don't appeal to everyone btw), you can move to Vancouver across the river, which thanks to Portland's policy, is sprawling more than ever.
When an entire region begins acting exclusively, whether through a UGB, or through exclusive practices across many municipalities (the classic case), providing "amenities" as Fischel puts it, people can be excluded, and labor costs can be impacted. Really what's the difference between the impact of a UGB and snob zoning (and the intention)? This is not a prety picture for the economy or social equity.
I dont have a fundamental problem with UGBs, so long as they are tempered by a policy that channels growth elsewhere. In Oregon only the property rights movement has made that state recognize the error of its ways, with voter-passed referenda putting a stop to the over-reduction of property values by government intervention.

And about Portland, I don't get it. It's nice, it's pretty, it has hipsters (aka sterile). By the numbers anyway, it's not even that dense. The city has a density of 4,300 per sq mile, and the densest census tracts are around 25,000. Evil Los Angeles, by contrast, has a density of 8,200 per square mile, and the densest census tracts approach 95,000 per square mile. In fact Portland is more comparable to Atlanta, with a population density of 4,000 per square mile, although even there the densest census tracts reach 40,000.
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