New Geography

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  • Academics Find Chicago Most Corrupt Big City

    One of the great failures in studying the politics of American cities has been the assumptions political scientists have used. Many academics assume that politicians work toward serving the public interest. In this naïve or dishonest world, an informed public (aided by a vigilant press) votes for candidates that rise above petty self interest to promote the common good. Recently, The University of Illinois-Chicago Political Science department released an impressive empirical study on corruption. Chicago is number one in public corruption. The facts are rather disturbing, “Since 1973, 31 more aldermen have been convicted of corruption. Approximately 100 aldermen have served since then, which is a conviction rate of about one-third.”

    The study shows that Chicago city council isn’t the only place in Illinois racking up felony convictions. Illinois Governors have an “ethics problem”:

    Since 1970, four Illinois governors have been convicted of corruption. Yet only seven men have held this office in this time, meaning more than half of the state’s governors have been convicted in the past forty-two years. Otto Kerner, who served from 1961 until his resignation in 1968 to accept a federal judgeship, was convicted in 1973 of mail fraud, bribery, perjury, and income tax evasion while governor. Dan Walker, who served from 1973 – 1977, was convicted in 1987 of obtaining fraudulent loans for the business he operated after he left office.

    George Ryan, who served from 1999 – 2003, was found guilty in 2006 of racketeering, conspiracy and numerous other charges. Many of the charges were part of a huge scandal, later called “Licenses for Bribes,” which resulted in the conviction of more than 40 state workers and private citizens. The scandal involved unqualified truck drivers receiving licenses in exchange for bribes that would ultimately end up in Ryan’s campaign fund. The scandal came to light when a recipient of one of these licenses crashed in to a van and killed six children. But perhaps the most famous of all Illinois corrupt officials is Rod Blagojevich, who served from 2003 until his impeachment in 2009. Blagojevich was ultimately convicted in 2011 of trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Other charges included his attempting to shake down Children’s Memorial Hospital for a campaign contribution in return for funding and his trying to extort a racetrack owner.

    When Rod Blagojevich reports in March  to Littleton, Colorado, American history will be made. Illinois will have to back-to- back Governors in jail at the same time. What is it about Chicago and Illinois voters that gets them to vote for crooks? The data in the study is based on Justice Department numbers going back to 1976.

    As we move closer to the next Presidential election, Barack Obama’s association with Chicago’s political culture is bound to be an issue once again. How could a Chicago politician rise so far, so fast, without questioning the corrupt part of the country he comes from? It’s something to keep in mind when you read this study.

  • Time to Rethink This Experiment? Delusion Down Under

    The famous physicist, Albert Einstein, was noted for his powers of observation and rigorous observance of the scientific method. It was insanity, he once wrote, to repeat the same experiment over and over again, and to expect a different outcome. With that in mind, I wonder what Einstein would make of the last decade and a bit of experimentation in Queensland’s urban planning and development assessment? 

    Fortunately, we don’t need Einstein’s help on this one because even the most casual of observers would conclude that after more than a decade of ‘reform’ and ‘innovation’ in the fields of town planning and the regulatory assessment of development, it now costs a great deal more and takes a great deal longer to do the same thing for no measureable benefit. As experiments go, this is one we might think about abandoning or at the very least trying something different.

    First, let’s quickly review the last decade or so of change in urban planning and development assessment. Up until the late 1990s, development assessment was relatively more straightforward under the Local Government (Planning and Environment) Act of 1990. Land already zoned for industrial use required only building consent to develop an industrial building. Land zoned for housing likewise required compliance with building approvals for housing. These were usually granted within a matter of weeks or (at the outset) months. 

    There were small head works charges, which essentially related to connection costs of services to the particular development. Town planning departments in local and state governments were fairly small in size and focussed mainly on strategic planning and land use zoning. It was the building departments that did most of the approving. Land not zoned for its intended use was subject to a process of development application (for rezoning), but here again the approach was much less convoluted that today. NIMBY’s and hard left greenies were around back then, but they weren’t in charge. Things happened, and they happened far more quickly, at lower cost to the community, than now.

    In the intervening decade and a bit, we’ve seen the delivery and implementation of an avalanche of regulatory and legislative intervention. It started with the Integrated Planning Act (1997), which sought to integrate disparate approval agencies into one ‘fast track’ simplified system. It immediately slowed everything down.  It promised greater freedom under an alleged ‘performance based’ assessment system, but in reality provoked local councils to invoke the ‘precautionary principle’ by submitting virtually everything to detailed development assessment. The Integrated Planning Act was followed, with much fanfare, by the Sustainable Planning Act (2009). Cynics, including some in the government at the time, dryly noted that a key performance measure of the Sustainable Planning Act was that it used the word ‘sustainable’ on almost every page. 

    Overlaying these regulations have been a constant flow of land use regulations in the form of regional plans, environmental plans, acid sulphate soil plans, global warming, sky-is-falling, seas-are-rising plans – plans for just about everything which also affect what can and can’t be done with individual pieces of private property.
    But it wasn’t just the steady withdrawal of private property rights as state and local government agencies gradually assumed more control over permissible development on other people’s land. There was also a philosophical change on two essential fronts.

    First, there was the notion that we were rapidly running out of land and desperately needed to avoid becoming a 200 kilometre wide city. Fear mongers warned of ‘LA type sprawl’ and argued the need for densification, based largely on innocuous sounding planning notions like ‘Smart Growth’ imported from places like California (population 36 million, more than 1.5 times all of Australia, and Los Angeles, population 10 million, roughly three times the population of south east Queensland).  The first ‘South east Queensland Regional Plan 2005-2026’ was born with these philosophical changes in mind, setting an urban growth boundary around the region and mandating a change to higher density living (despite broad community disinterest in density). It was revisited by the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031 which formally announced that 50% of all new dwellings should be delivered via infill and density models (without much thought, clearly, for how this was to be achieved and whether anyone particularly wanted it). Then there was the South East Queensland Regional Infrastructure Plan 2010-2031 which promised $134 billion in infrastructure spending to make this all possible (without much thought to where the money might come from) and a host of state planning policies to fill in any gaps which particular interest groups or social engineers may have identified as needing to be filled.

    The significant philosophical change, enforced by the regional plan, was that land for growth instantly became scarcer because planning permission would be denied in areas outside the artificially imposed land boundary. Scarcity of any product, particularly during a time of rising demand (as it was back then, when south east Queensland had a strong economy to speak of) results in rising prices. That is just what happened to any land capable of gaining development permission within the land boundary: raw land rose in price, much faster than house construction costs or wages. 

    The other significant philosophical change that took root was the notion of ‘user pays’ – which became a byword for buck passing the infrastructure challenge from the community at large, to new entrants, via developer levies. Local governments state-wide took to the notion of ‘developer levies’ with unseemly greed and haste. ‘Greedy developers’ could afford to pay (they argued) plus the notion of ‘user pays’ gave them some (albeit shaky) grounds for ideological justification. Soon, developers weren’t just being levied for the immediate cost of infrastructure associated with their particular development, but were being charged with the costs of community-wide infrastructure upgrades well beyond the impact of their proposal or its occupants. 

    Levies rose faster than Poseidon shares in the ‘70s. Soon enough, upfront per lot levies went past the $50,000 per lot mark and although recent moves to cap these per lot levies to $28,000 per dwelling have been introduced, many observers seem to think that councils are now so addicted that they’ll find alternate ways to get around the caps.

    So the triple whammy of ‘reform’ in just over a decade was that regulations and complexity exploded, supply became artificially constrained to meet some deterministic view of how and where us mere citizens might be permitted to live, and costs and charges levied on new housing (and new development generally) exploded.

    At no point during this period, and this has to be emphasised, can anyone honestly claim that this has achieved anything positive. It has made housing prohibitively expensive, and less responsive to market signals. Simply put, it takes longer, costs more, and is vastly more complicated than it was before, for no measureable gain.

    An indication of this was given to me recently in the form of the Sunshine Coast Council’s budget for its development assessment ‘directorate.’ (How apropos is that term? It would be just as much at home in a Soviet planning bureau).  Their budget (the documents had to be FOI’d) for 2009-10 financial year included a total employee costs budget of $17.4 million.  For the sake of argument, let’s assume the average directorate comrade was paid $80,000 per annum. That would mean something like more than 200 staff in total. Now they might all be very busy, but it surely says something about how complexity and costs have poisoned our assessment system if the Sunshine Coast Council needs to spend over $17 million of its ratepayer’s money just to employ people to assess development applications in a down market.

    If there had been any meaningful measures attached to these changes in approach over the last decade, we’d be better placed to assess how they’ve performed. But there weren’t, so let’s instead retrospectively apply some:

    Is there now more certainty? No. Ask anyone. Developers are confused. The community is confused. Even regulators are confused and frequently resort to planning lawyers, which often leads to more confusion. The simple question of ‘what can be done on this piece of land’ is now much harder to answer.

    Is there more efficiency? No. Any process which now takes so much longer and costs so much more cannot be argued to be efficient.

    Is the system more market responsive? No. Indeed the opposite could be argued – that the system is less responsive to market signals or consumer preference. Urban planning and market preference have become gradually divorced to the point that some planners actively view the market preferences of homebuyers with contempt.

    Are we getting better quality product? Many developers will argue that even on this criteria, the system has dumbed down innovation such that aesthetic, environmental or design initiatives have to fight so much harder to get through that they’re simply not worth doing.

    Is infrastructure delivery more closely aligned with demand? One of the great promises of a decade of ‘reform’ was that infrastructure deficits would be addressed if urban expansion and infrastructure delivery were aligned. Well it’s been done in theory via countless reports and press releases but it’s hardly been delivered in execution. And when the volumes of infrastructure levies collected by various agencies has been examined, it’s often been found that the money’s been hoarded and not even being spent on the very things it was collected for.

    Is the community better served? Maybe elements of the green movement would say so, but for young families trying to enter the housing market, the answer is an emphatic (and expensive) no. How can prohibitively expensive new housing costs be good for the community? For communities in established urban areas, there is more confusion about the impact of density planning, which has made NIMBY’s even more hostile than before.

    Has it been good for the economy? South east Queensland’s economy was once driven by strong population growth – the very reason all this extra planning was considered necessary. But growth has stalled, arguably due to the very regulatory systems and pricing regimes that were designed around it. We now have some of the slowest rates of population growth in recent history and our interstate competitiveness – in terms of land prices and the costs of development – is at an all time low. That’s hardly what you’d call a positive outcome.

    Is the environment better served? If you believe that the only way the environment can be better served is by choking off growth under the weight of regulation and taxation, you might say yes. But then again, studies repeatedly show that the density models proposed under current planning philosophies promote less environmentally efficient forms of housing, and can cause more congestion, than the alternate. So even if the heroic assumptions for the scale of infill and high density development contained in regional plans was actually by some miracle achieved, the environment might be worse off, not better, for it. 

    All up, it’s a pretty damming assessment of what’s been achieved in just over a decade. Of course the proponents of the current approach might warn that – without all this complexity, cost and frustration – Queensland would be subject to ‘runaway growth’ and a ‘return to the policies of sprawl.’ The answer to that, surely, is that everything prior to the late 1990s was delivered – successfully – without all this baggage. Life was affordable, the economy strong, growth was a positive and things were getting done. Queensland, and south east Queensland in particular, was regarded as a place with a strong future and a magnet for talent and capital. Now, that’s been lost.

    Einstein would tell us to stop this experiment and try something else if we aren’t happy with the results. To persist with the current frameworks and philosophies can only mean the advocates of the status quo consider these outcomes to be acceptable.  Is anyone prepared to put up their hand and say that they are?

    Ross Elliott has more than 20 years experience in property and public policy. His past roles have included stints in urban economics, national and state roles with the Property Council, and in destination marketing. He has written extensively on a range of public policy issues centering around urban issues, and continues to maintain his recreational interest in public policy through ongoing contributions such as this or via his monthly blog The Pulse.

    Photo by Flickr user Mansionwb

  • Why Pleas to Increase Infrastructure Funding Fall on Deaf Ears

    Letting the nation’s roads and bridges deteriorate may worsen traffic congestion and add to our commuting woes, but when water and sewer systems begin to fail our very civilization is at risk. That is the message of a recent story in The Washington Post drawing attention to the alarming state of the nation’s water and sewer infrastructure. The story looks at the Washington D.C. system as a poster child for neglected and dilapidated municipal utilities. The average age of the District water pipes is 77 years and a great many were laid in the 19th century, notes the Post article. Emergency crews rush from site to site to tackle an average of 450 breaks a year. ("Billions needed to upgrade America’s leaky water infrastructure," by Alfred Halsey III, January 2, 2012).

    Antiquated municipal water and sewer systems are indeed a ticking bomb— all the more so since their deterioration, unlike that of highways and bridges— remains invisible until a break occurs. But maintaining water and sewer infrastructure in a state of good repair is a fairly straightforward challenge. Water supply and sewers are a public utility and as such they can cover their maintenance and replacement costs through user fees. So can many other public services such as electricity, natural gas, broadband and telecommunications. The ability to charge for service (and to raise rates as necessary) assures public utilities a steady and reliable stream of revenue with which to maintain, preserve and grow their assets.

    Finding the resources to keep transportation infrastructure in good order is a more difficult challenge. Unlike traditional utilities, roads and bridges have no rate payers to fall back on. Politicians and the public seem to attach a low priority to fixing aging transportation infrastructure and this translates into a lack of support for raising fuel taxes or imposing tolls.

    Investment in infrastructure did not even make the top ten list of public priorities in the latest Pew Research Center survey of domestic concerns. Calls by two congressionally mandated commissions to vastly increase transportation infrastructure spending have gone ignored. So have repeated pleas by advocacy groups such as Building America’s Future, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

    Nor has the need to increase federal spending on infrastructure come up in the numerous policy debates held by the Republican presidential candidates. Even President Obama seems to have lost his former fervor for this issue. In his last State-of-the-Union message he made only a perfunctory reference to "rebuilding roads and bridges." High-speed rail and an infrastructure bank, two of the President’s past favorites, were not even mentioned.

    Why pleas to increase infrastructure funding fall on deaf ears

    There are various theories why appeals to increase infrastructure spending do not resonate with the public. One widely held view is that people simply do not trust the federal government to spend their tax dollars wisely. As proof, evidence is cited that a great majority of state and local transportation ballot measures do get passed, because voters know precisely where their tax money is going. No doubt there is much truth to that. Indeed, thanks to local funding initiatives and the use of tolling, state transportation agencies are becoming increasingly more self-reliant and less dependent on federal funding

    Another explanation, and one that I find highly plausible, has been offered by Charles Lane, editorial writer for the Washington Post. Wrote Lane in an October 31, 2011 Washington Post column, "How come my family and I traveled thousands of miles on both the east and west coast last summer without actually seeing any crumbling roads or airports? On the whole, the highways and byways were clean, safe and did not remind me of the Third World countries. … Should I believe the pundits or my own eyes?" asked Lane ("The U.S. infrastructure argument that crumbles upon examination").

    Along with Lane, I think the American public is skeptical about alarmist claims of "crumbling infrastructure" because they see no evidence of it around them. State DOTs and transit authorities take great pride in maintaining their systems in good condition and, by and large, they succeed in doing a good job of it. Potholes are rare, transit buses and trains seldom break down, and collapsing bridges, happily, are few and far between.

    The oft-cited "D" that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given America’s infrastructure (along with an estimate of $2.2 trillion needed to fix it) is taken with a grain of salt, says Lane, since the engineers’ lobby has a vested interest in increasing infrastructure spending, which means more work for engineers.  Suffering from the same credibility problem are the legions of road and transit builders, rail and road equipment manufacturers, construction firms, planners and consultants that try to make a case for more money.

    This does not mean that the country does not need to invest more resources in preserving and expanding its highways and transit systems. The "infrastructure deficit" is real. It’s just that in making a case for higher spending, the transportation community must do a much better job of explaining why, how and where they propose to spend those funds. Usupported claims that the nation’s infrastructure is "falling apart" will not be taken seriously.

    People want to know where their tax dollars are going and what exactly they’re getting for their money. Infrastructure advocates must learn from state and local ballot measures to justify and document the needs for federal dollars with more precision so that the public regains confidence that their money will be spent wisely and well.

  • The Moonbeam Express

    Seldom has public opinion and expert judgment been more unified than in its opposition to  the California high-speed rail project.    The project has been criticized by its own Peer Review Group, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), the California State Auditor,  the State Treasurer and a group of independent  experts  (Enthoven, Grindley, Warren et al.).  In addition, the bullet train has come under severe criticism by influential state legislators and  by members of the state’s congressional delegation. Equally damaging to the project’s future prospects have been two public opinion surveys showing  that California voters have turned solidly against the project, and the opposition of  virtually all of California’s newspapers, including The Orange County Register, whose latest editorial we reprint below.  

    Editorial: Bullet train becoming "Moonbeam Express" (OC Register, Feb 1, 2012)
    Gov. Jerry Brown wants to use anti-global-warming carbon taxes to fund California’s much-maligned high-speed rail project. 

    In a brazen denial of the obvious, Gov. Jerry Brown now insists the proposed California high-speed rail can be built for much less than its own business plan stipulates, and wants to use anti-global-warming carbon taxes to underwrite the proposal, whose price tag has nearly tripled in the three years since voters approved it.

    The governor seems intent on demonstrating how California’s state government has burdened taxpayers with mounting debt, while overspending to create consecutive years of budget deficits. The rail project has been dubbed "the train to nowhere" because the only portion close to being built would link relatively sparsely populated Central Valley towns and no metropolitan areas. Perhaps with Mr. Brown’s new foolish insistence, it should be christened the Moonbeam Express. 

    Since the rail proposal appeared on the 2008 ballot, it has been widely and legitimately criticized in detailed analyses by the rail project’s own Peer Review Group, the state auditor, treasurer, Legislative Analyst’s Office, local governments including Tulare, Madera and Kings counties and the city of Palo Alto, numerous state and federal lawmakers from both parties and studies by UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation and the Reason Foundation. These highly unfavorable critiques reflect many of the criticisms the Register Editorial Board has raised since the project was proposed.

    In only three years, the train’s estimated cost has increased from $33 billion to $98.5 billion in the latest version of its own ever-changing business plan.

    Voters approved only $9.9 billion in bonds based on the rest coming from Washington and local governments along the route, and private investors. Washington has provided about $3 billion and not another dime has materialized or been pledged. Meanwhile, the estimated completion of the original phase of the project, from San Francisco to Anaheim, has been extended 14 years beyond the original estimate of 2020.

    Ridership estimates are unrealistic, meaning trains can’t operate solely on ticket revenue as required by the initiative. Costs, even at their current highest level, are certain to increase, and the needed additional funding sources are not forthcoming. Given hostility in Congress to the project, more money from Washington, which is grappling with its own massive deficits and debts, won’t be seen in the foreseeable future.

    State Sen. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, introduced a bill Monday to put the high-speed rail proposal back on the November ballot so voters can de-authorize selling the $9.9 billion in bonds.

    The Register has urged this ill-conceived and increasingly untenable project be resubmitted to voters. Thankfully, for the most part, bonds remain unsold. There is no reason taxpayers should assume billions more debt — with annual interest payments of up to $1 billion — when the likelihood is remote the train ever will be built, despite the governor’s strained assurance.

    Moreover, state Sen. Diane Harkey, R-Dana Point, notes that the governor’s proposed new revenue stream — carbon taxes created by the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act— is another hoped-for, rather than assured, solution. "The state’s cap-and-trade program is not yet in operation, and revenue estimates of $1 billion per year are unreliable and unsubstantiated," Ms. Harkey said. "Relying on projected revenues that fall short is the key reason why our state deficit continues to explode year after year. To rush this project forward, just using up the $3.5 billion of federal funds, with the hope of an additional funding mechanism based on guesswork, is irresponsible."

  • Families: The New Demographic Mash-Up

    Look back a few weeks to the surprise success in Iowa for Republican presidential primary contender Rick Santorum. Today, there is increased scrutiny of the conservative values the hard-line social conservative so enthusiastically endorsed. Political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic has become more vocal about whether or not there is a need for a restoration of the ‘nuclear family’ as a platform for a successful society. And the questioning of the nuclear family is not just a debate about whether hardline conservatism is good for society. It has expanded to include another question: is it even possible for a society with relatively static demographics to be based around households of a mother, a father and children? Do long-term demographic forces allow for a nuclear family, or will the future hold a new set of family geographies?

    The Pre-Transitional Family

    Rewind demographic models back a few stages to the pre-transitional era, and it’s apparent that the lifespan, the important decisions, and the experience of the family resembles little of what we see or even imagine today. The overwhelming demographic force of the era was mortality. Death was never far away. It was the social norm for children to be lost in childbirth or infancy. Disease was prevalent, and life expectancy was short. The speed of the human life cycle ensured that it was rare for inter-generational relationships to exist. Child /grandparent relationships were rare, and even child/parent relationships were short, whereas horizontal relationships (between cousins, for example) were far more common. It has been argued that these high mortality rates caused emotional detachment from the immediate social networks, allowing phenomena such as the social acceptance of infanticide to prevail, sowing the seeds for the emerging gender crises in Asia.

    The Transitional Family

    The 20th century marked rapid changes in family structure. In demographic terms, each generation was less like the last. The subsequent fertility decline resulting from the gradual liberation of woman in society meant that there were a decreasing number of children in the household. In the United States, average household size fell from 5.6 in 1850 to 2.6 in 2000. Neil Howe’s interview with Social Intelligence outlined the consequences of this in countries with below replacement fertility:

    “…in two generations you end up with a society in which the typical young adult not only has no siblings, but also has no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. Most young people will have two living parents, and four grandparents, but no other blood relations. In China, they call it the 4-2-1 problem, where one child is meant to support all of them.”

    Of course, 4-2-1 is only a problem because of the unevenness of too many elderly and too few young. For many 21st century children with little extended family, the absence of siblings is a blessing in many ways. Greater emotional attachment from parents has given children access to a greater share of their parent’s resources, allowing them to enjoy healthier food and education compared with a family where parental resources were divided among several siblings. The net result of a society with a larger proportion of both adults and of children that have received relatively high levels of social capital investment is staggering in economic terms. South Korea is a testament to that, with fertility falling from 6.1 in 1960 to 1.2 in 2005. In those 45 years the South Koreans have managed to benefit from a greater per capita educational investment by building one of the most successful economies in the world.

    The Post-Transitional Family

    What defines a 21st century family? The Italian demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci describes the child as “the centre of family life”, referring to low fertility levels prevailing in the developed world, as well as the child being a bank of investment. However, in these austere times, a well-groomed child is becoming a less preferred option. Many couples have decided that no child is better than a poorly groomed child, and thus rates of childlessness have steadily been rising in the developed nations.

    Where does this society with fewer children leave marriage? The institution of marriage has been undergoing erosion from many angles. Urbanisation has widened social networks to a point where the family makes up only a small fraction of that network. Relationships of every kind are becoming shorter lived, with increased mobility and opportunities to contact more people. The rise in life expectancy has meant that married years extend for far longer, leading many people to become bored of the relationship or to simply end up regretting choosing the wrong partner.

    This has substantially boosted divorce rates. Indeed, the lure of a highflying career has either postponed or cancelled the ever-brittle marriage relationship, and informal relationships are becoming the preferred option. Men are recognising that the roles of father and household head are diminishing, with ever smaller and more informal households that network with friends, not family. Even in the Islamic theocracies there is evidence that pre-marital sex and informal unions are on the rise, giving increased weight to the question: Does marriage decline with development?

    The Politics of the New Family

    In Eastern Europe, declining marriage rates have been blamed on the collapse of Communism. The American Christian Right to this day blames marriage decline on ‘a lack of faith in God’. Needless to say, if the Christian Right were not opposed to homosexual marriage, the rate of marriage would increase significantly. In fairness however, increasingly secular attitudes are a strong argument for understanding marriage decline.

    Social attitude polls indicate a greater acceptance of gay marriage, abortion and equal rights towards women throughout the world, not to mention the explosion of secular attitudes among younger people. The gradual conservative to liberal attitude shift (that seems to be inline with demographic, social and economic forces) and its effect on marriage and demographics poses intriguing questions that have yet to be answered.

    My personal conviction is that it is the powerful underlying demographic forces that are breaking apart the cherished union, rather than any conscious tidal shift towards liberal attitudes. These are forces that cannot be pushed back in a free country. The more we urbanise and network, and the longer we live, the more marriage and the traditional notions of the nuclear family will erode. What will be left is a greater mix of smaller ‘traditional’ families, informal one child or childless unions where friends are more important than a formal family, and increasingly common polyamorous relationships. This leaves the family-centred ideal in disarray. It is something that will become less feasible with time, despite Rick Santorum’s best efforts to retain it.

    Photo from Bigstock

    Edward Morgan is a 3rd Year Human Geography student at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

  • What to Do About Gang Violence in Salinas California

    Is there any connection between the fact that Salinas has the gang problem that it does, and the fact that Monterey County’s restrictions on the building of housing are very strict? I can see why the inhabitants of the Monterey Peninsula might want to protect the coastal strip. But if they apply their policies to the whole county, it becomes very difficult to build any housing. I saw a proposal 40 years ago from Ralph Nader’s think tank that would encourage the building of Italian style hill towns along the hills along both sides of the South Santa Clara Valley, thus leaving the lowlands along the river for agriculture; such a plan could be applied to the Salinas Valley as well. I don’t have the expertise to draw the connection between restricted housing and the gang situation in Salinas, but surely the situation is worth looking at. What kind of novels would a John Steinbeck write, if he were growing up in Salinas today?

  • Fresh Winds Blowing on California High Speed Rail

    For California’s beleaguered high-speed rail project, last week brought plenty of  surprises and challenges.  Dominating the headlines were the resignations of several top officials of the High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA). Among them were board chairman Tom Umberg, CEO Roelof van Ark, board member Matthew Toledo, Deputy Director (Environment) Dan Leavitt and press secretary Rachel Wall. Dan Richard, a respected and trusted advisor of Gov. Jerry Brown, appointed to the Board last year, is expected to assume chairmanship of the Board (Umberg remains as a member of the board).

    The past week also saw the release of a fresh critique of CHSRA’s business plan and an avalanche of criticism by influential commentators and analysts. The critique, entitled Twelve Misleading Statements on Finance and Economic Issue in the CHSRA’s Draft 2012 Business Plan, received wide distribution among state legislators and senior officials in Gov. Brown’s administration. It was authored by a group of independent experts who have closely followed the project over the past two years — Alain C. Enthoven, William C. Grindley, William H. Warren, Michael G. Brownrigg and Alan H. Bushell. The report challenges methodically one by one the credibility of the business plan’s key assumptions concerning the project’s construction costs and financing; revenues, ridership and operational costs; and societal benefits. (http://www.cc-hsr.org)

    Last week’s press commentaries added to the climate of skepticism that is increasingly engulfing the project. In close succession, there appeared a January 8 column by the well known Sacramento Bee columnist, Dan Walters (It’s Time to Kill California’s Bullet Train Boondoggle); a January 9 op-ed in The Washington Post by the newspaper’s editorial writer Charles Lane (California’s High-Speed Rail to Nowhere); and a January 10 piece in The Wall Street Journal by Wendell Cox and Joseph Vranich (California’s High-Speed Rail Fibs).

    An Orange County Register editorial on January 12 further underscored the widespread opposition to the project by the state’s newspapers. The editorial sounded alarm about legislative attempts to fast-track the HSR project by exempting it from environmental review (Rep. Feuer’s Assembly Bill 1444) Waiving environmental regulations can speed project approval and undermine legal challenges, pointed the editorial. The HSR project already faces multiple court challenges on environmental grounds, with more suits likely.

    Even the Sierra Club has turned critical."The draft business plan does not leave us feeling optimistic about the viability of the current high-speed rail program," wrote Kathryn Phillips, Director of Sierra Club California in a January 13 letter to the Authority. "We urge the HSRA to reconsider its business plan."

    Departure of key personnel could mark a new beginning

    The unexpected departure of the Authority’s top officials has added to a series of reversals experienced by the project in recent days. Most damaging has been a scathing report by the independent Peer Review Group that pronounced the Authority’s plan "not financially feasible" and warned of "immense financial risk."  Adding to it has been a growing chorus of skeptical lawmakers and further news of declining public support (a SurveyUSA news poll showing only 33% of voters in favor of the bond sale).

    The abrupt mass resignations of senior management are seen as a bid by Governor Brown to assert a tighter control over a project that is facing a critical first test later this spring when the legislature will be asked to vote the first $2.7 billion in bonds to start the initial 130-mile stretch of the line in the Central Valley. Last week, Brown also announced that he intends to fold the Authority into a new state transportation agency, thus placing the project under more direct supervision of the Governor.

    So far, Gov. Brown has maintained steadfast support of the project, but his recent actions suggest that he is sensitive to public opinion and to the political winds blowing from the state capitol. Many lawmakers, some from the Governor’s own party, counsel against rushing ahead with construction and suggest taking the time to thoroughly rethink the business plan. They include Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D), chairman of the select committee on high-speed rail; Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D), chairman of the transportation committee; and Sen. Joe Simitian (D), chairman of the budget subcommittee overseeing transportation. The dim prospects for any further federal funds or for private money to support the project beyond the "Initial Construction Section" must also weigh heavily in the Governor’s assessment of the project’s long-term viability.  

    In the meantime, changes may be expected in the Rail Authority’s management style. Those who know the incoming chairman well look forward to an agency that will be less confrontational, more respectful of its critics and more attentive to the legislators. They hope the Authority will be more willing to reach out and build bridges to citizen groups and will assert more control over its contractors.

    Only time will tell whether last week’s events represent a true turning point for this divisive initiative. However, multiple signs coming out of Sacramento give people reasons to hope that real changes in direction are indeed underway.

    Ken Orski has worked professionally in the field of transportation for over 30 years.

    CA route map by Wikipedia user CountZ.

  • After Seven Billion

    An interview in Social Intelligence with Neil Howe on the changing nature of human population growth and its implications for politics, culture, and business.

    Headlines around the world are trumpeting the United Nations’ announcement that the world population is now hitting seven billion and may reach eight billion in another 14 years. Yet lost in much of the commentary is any understanding of how the dynamics of population growth are fundamentally changing and what this means for the composition of the workforce, consumption patterns, and the general direction of society. To glean insight into these questions, SI interviewed LifeCourse founder and president Neil Howe, who has spoken and published widely on these topics over the last three decades.

    SI: Neil, before we talk about the population outlook today, can you give us a brief primer on the demographic trends that got us here?
    NH: Sure. The first 500,000 years or so can be summarized in a sentence. Women generally had six or more kids, but many if not most of them died young, so human population hardly grew. For most people, life may not have been solitary—but it was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Then, about 300 years ago, there arrived the so-called “first demographic transition,” an era when mortality rates began to decline. That sparked a great population surge, particularly in Europe, North America, and China, beginning in the 1700s. This population explosion gave rise, particularly by the time of the French Revolution, to thinkers like Thomas Malthus. He famously theorized that human population growth would inevitably lead to more and more competition for food and other natural resources so that mankind would always be gripped in a struggle for subsistence.

    SI: But it didn’t turn out that way…
    NH: No, it didn’t. Eventually people began to realize that they didn’t need to have so many children just to ensure that two or three survived. Thus began the so-called “second demographic revolution.” Birthrates began to decline in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, initially only in western societies. Meanwhile, markets and science and new notions of progress brought us the Industrial Revolution and dramatic improvements in the productivity of agriculture. Bottom line? Because the rate of population growth decelerated and per-capita living standards rose, the Malthusian nightmare never happened. Our higher living standards produced public health measures and medicines that drastically cut child mortality, which has kept the rate of population growth from falling as fast as it otherwise might have. Even so, even as the numbers of people on the planet continued to rise, global living standards have continued to rise even faster.

    SI: Then why did we hear so much alarm in the late 1960s and ‘70s about the coming “Population Bomb?”
    NH: You are referring to Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller, which back then achieved enormous influence throughout the world. Everyone pointed to the book-cover image of hordes of people being crowded off the edge of continents. Many who came of age reading Ehrlich simply assumed that this was our future. At that time, world population growth, having slumped in the 1930s and ‘40s, was again growing rapidly. Not only did it seem like the American postwar “baby boom” would go on forever, but dramatic declines in child and infant mortality in places like India and China were triggering an explosive acceleration in population growth throughout what was then known as the “Third World.”

    SI: So what happened?
    NH: Well, all these trends turned out to be temporary. What Ehrlich and many others missed was the dramatic further decline in birthrates that would soon come. The American baby boom turned into the baby bust, resulting in today’s smallish Generation X—whose much smaller numbers of native-born U.S. births per year were later hidden, to some extent, by higher rates of immigration. Birthrates fell even more dramatically in Europe, Asia, and the former Soviet Union, and unlike in the United States, those birthrates stayed low. In fact, they fell well below the level needed to sustain their populations over time. Russia is now experiencing the steepest sustained population decline of any society since the bubonic plague. Japan is now in its fourth year of depopulation. And in recent years, the phenomenon demographers call “sub-replacement fertility” has even spread to many developing countries, including Brazil and parts of the Middle East, including Iran.

    SI: But then why is the United Nations telling us that world population will grow from seven to eight billion in just the next 14 years?
    NH: Partly it’s because there are some regions where the birthrates are still comparatively high, such as sub-Saharan Africa. The U.N. believes these rates are sustainable. I believe they aren’t. Do you really think that Nigeria in 2050 will have twice the population of Western Europe? It’s also because we are still facing a population explosion of seniors around the world. As my LifeCourse colleague, Phil Longman, recently noted in an article for Foreign Policy magazine, the U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years more than half of the world’s projected population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. In fact, the U.N. projects that, by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will actually start falling globally. And that’s even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developed world.

    SI: So if remaining population growth doesn’t come from more children, that must mean we are all living much longer?
    NH: That’s part of the explanation. But it’s mostly because yesterday’s youth bulges, like a pig moving through a python, are now or soon will be swelling the ranks of the old, just as they once swelled the ranks of youth and later of the middle-aged. So population grows even without any increase in the number of children. After these aging Boomers pass on, however, we face the very real prospect that world population will begin to decline. It is easy to imagine that we may never get to that eight billionth person on earth.

    SI: What’s behind this global “birth dearth?”
    NH: There are a lot of theories. The main one is that the traditional motivations for childbearing are no longer as strong in modernizing societies. Children used to be an economic asset to their parents. They helped on the farm. Now, with more than half the world’s population living in urban areas, children are no longer an economic asset for most people, but an avoidable and increasingly expensive liability. Having lots of children also used to be a smart strategy to provide for one’s security in old age. The advent of Social Security and private pension plans has lessened that motive.

    SI: Yes, but we hear constantly these days about how pension plans are going broke.
    NH: That’s not a coincidence. Population aging means there are fewer workers to support each retiree, and that has all kinds of implications, not just for pension finance, but for the economy as a whole. In places like Greece, Spain, and Italy, we are looking at societies in which, by the mid-2030s, half the population will be over 50—and in which more people will be celebrating their 80th birthdays each year than will be born. How are things going to work out politically when a decisive majority of the voting age population will be retired or near retirement? Already, the inversion of the age pyramid is the underlying story behind most of the economic turmoil facing Europe today. Slow growing or shrinking workforces diminish consumer demand, forcing capital to take evermore risks in search of reasonable returns. While demography is not destiny, it’s the tide in which we all must swim.

    SI: How does this affect the family life?
    NH: If you have a society where fertility is half the replacement rate (like in Italy, Bulgaria, or South Korea), in two generations you end up with a society in which the typical young adult not only has no siblings, but also has no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. Most young people will have two living parents, and four grandparents, but no other blood relations. In China, they call it the 4-2-1 problem, where one child is meant to support all of them.

    SI: That raises interesting questions of what a society of single children will be like.
    NH: Extended families are one of the basic institutions that individuals rely on as a social safety net in times of trouble—unemployment, hunger, sickness, disease. It’s the basic institution for socialization. It’s interesting to think about a world where these nuclear families are incredibly small and often fatherless, and the extended family doesn’t exist at all. In America, our extended families remain strong—and are getting stronger, due to generational forces. But what about extreme low-fertility societies, where only-children are the established norm? By definition, the extended family will evaporate. Who will fill the void? Will government rush in to provide benefits the extended family can no longer provide? If so, how can government afford to step in when the supply of taxpayers is shrinking compared to the supply of dependent elders? In these societies, we may have to look for the evolution of new, informal institutions that will take the place of both the extended family and the welfare state.

    SI: In China, there’s the stereotype of the “Little Emperor.” What will be the dominant personality traits of a generation of only children?
    NH: Social science finds only-children and first-borns do tend to have specific personality traits. Some are positive. For example, only-children and first-borns are associated with higher achievement, higher measured IQ, and a higher sense of overall planning and drive. But there are negatives as well. Research on only-children shows they tend to be less attuned to the need to please others, and less willing to be team players. You can draw a portrait of a society made up mainly of only-children and first-borns as being a bit more self-absorbed and a bit less accustomed to reaching out to strangers.

    SI: Can we also expect that with fewer young people we’ll have fewer entrepreneurs?
    NH: Entrepreneurship is negatively correlated with age. New businesses and new ideas generally come from young adults. But that’s not the only aspect of economic behavior that will be affected. When you’re in your 20s and 30s, it’s easier to change jobs and move to new places, lowering what economists call “frictional unemployment.” Today, I have no doubt that unemployment in the U.S. would be lower if we didn’t have such a high percentage of the population that is middle-aged or older, and thus unwilling or unable to assume risks, move to a new location, and acquire the skills needed to adjust to a rapidly changing workplace.

    SI: What does that say for the overall picture, globally?
    NH: In some of Western Europe’s societies, the working-age population may be declining by a percent or a percent and a half a year by the 2030s and ‘40s. That may wipe out any gains from productivity growth, so you might find that real GDP stays flat even with robust innovation. The declining number of workers will cancel out whatever growth might come from automation, for example. So even at full employment, GDP no longer grows. We already see this prospect dawning in all the worries over the Euro, as EU leaders suddenly realize it’s very hard for nations like Italy to bring down their debt-to-GDP ratios if their projected GDPs are no longer expected to grow—even after the recession ends. But that’s not all. Economic historians often point to a broader dysfunction that typically overtakes zero-growth economies.

    SI: Are you talking about the 1930s, for example?
    NH: Yes. Or much longer eras, like the fifteenth century in Western Europe. Historians observe that in a world in which businesses are no longer carving out new markets and industry is no longer growing, leaders gravitate toward a psychology of risk aversion. Companies just want to protect their current revenue, and industries just want to protect their “given” customer base against encroachment. It’s a world that favors monopolies, guilds, cartels, sweetheart deals with political rulers, and protection against imports. This trend may be further reinforced by the predominance of single children and by the emergence of an older workforce. Of course, voters will also be older, leading policy makers to take fewer chances and be less enterprising with changes in public policies. The biggest challenge will be in very low-fertility societies—Japan, China, Southern Europe, and across the former Soviet Union.

    SI: You are painting a pretty gloomy picture here.
    NH: Yes and no. There are real challenges presented by global aging, particularly in the areas of pension and health care finance. And we’ll have to get used to lower rates of GDP growth. In the U.S., we’ll probably also see lower rates of immigration, both because of the sharp falloff in birthrates in Mexico and throughout Latin America, and because aging societies tend towards xenophobia. But there are real opportunities as well, not only for society, but also for firms and individuals who see these trends coming and know how to offer appropriate products and services. That means, for example, not just tapping into the exploding demand from older consumers, but understanding how tomorrow’s generation of seniors will have different needs, means, and preferences than seniors in the past.

    SI: So, you’re saying that just because we’ll have more old people, we shouldn’t expect an explosion in Oldsmobile sales?
    NH: That’s one way to think of it. Concretely, one needs to understand not just that the 65+ population will be the fastest-growing demographic group in most countries for decades to come. One also needs to understand that members of this older population belong to a particular generation. In the U.S., we call them Baby Boomers, and they have very particular ideas about the roles they want to play in later life, while their children and grandchildren also have particular ideas about the roles this generation of elders should play. People who understand how global aging and generational change intersect will do quite well in the world that’s coming, whether they are politicians, inventors of new technology, or creators of culture.  So when we discuss Boomers in SI, readers should keep in mind the larger context of global aging, which lends even greater weight to these generational trends.

    Social Intelligence v1, n6 (LifeCourse Associates, 2011).

  • Three Cheers for Urban Sprawl

    “Hands off Our Land!” screams the Daily Telegraph, like some shotgun-toting red-faced farmer.  The newspaper, on behalf of the reactionary toffs who form the least pleasant section of its readership, has launched a campaign directed against ‘urban sprawl’ (ie. the rest of us).

    On a good day, the Telegraph serves up enlightened articles by progressive liberals like Janet Daley and Simon Heffer and Jeff Randal (I’m talking about real liberals here, not American Trotskyites).  But then it disappears under the desk, drinks some devilish, bubbling potion and emerges looking like Mr Hyde, all wonky teeth and messy hair.  “Hands off Our Land” is the Telegraph at its worst – a campaign to thwart the government’s all-too-modest suggestions to reform Britain’s vicious planning laws.  

    NIMBY (Not In My Back-Yard) is a misnomer.  As James Heartfield observes in his brilliant book Let’s Build! if it was their back-yard there wouldn’t be a problem.  By “Our Land”, the Telegraph’s Colonel Blimps do not mean “land owned by us”.  They mean “other people’s land”, over which they wish to continue to exercise control via the State. 

    The battle against suburbanisation (which the Greens these days clothe in the jargon of ‘sustainability’) has been going on for decades, and the success of the NIMBYs in keeping the bulk of Britain’s population locked inside towns and cities, has disfigured Britain and blighted the lives of millions of people.  As a result of State planning restrictions, Britons are stuffed into towns and cities like battery-farmed chickens.  We are among the most densely packed people in the world.  In Britain, 90 percent of people live in urban areas.  In Germany (which has a similar population density) only 75 percent of people live in urban areas, while only 68 percent of Italians live in urban areas, and only 62 percent of the Irish (is the Italian or Irish countryside so awful?).  In India only 30 percent of the people live in urban areas. 

    And to make matters much worse for the Brits, our urban areas constitute a mere 9 percent of total land use.  That’s right – 90 percent of the people crammed into 9 percent of Britain.  Compare that to the 13 percent of land devoted to ‘Green Belt’ (the stuff holding us in).  Even in the South East of England, by far the most densely crowded bit of the UK, woodland and farmland, absurdly, accounts for more than three quarters of land use. 

    Britain is not a crowded island – contrary to the frothing rants from the misanthropes at the Telegraph.  Viewers wrote in to express their incredulity when the BBC broadcast a series called ‘Britain from Above’.  The BBC helicopters filmed hour after hour of vast, unending tracts of flat, rectangular fields and giant swathes of green nothingness.  It was astonishing to the naïve urbanites watching to see how empty the place was.  (Just take a look on Google satellite images).  The reason why Britain feels, to most of us, like an overcrowded island, is because all most of us ever see are congested towns and cities (or a fleeting glimpse of industrial farmland out of a car window as we travel along ‘urban corridors’ between towns). 

    Hemming people into towns and cities with ‘Green Belts’, has acted like a pressure-cooker on property prices.  The planning system, by limiting the amount of land available to build on, has created an artificial shortage of living space, forcing up the prices of houses and flats to such astronomical heights that many young couples can only dream of affording one.  The less affluent dare not get a job for fear of losing housing benefit.  There are families in London where the children sleep three and four to a room – a tiny room in a dingy flat.  Children who have outgrown their cots are forced to stay in them, sleeping with their legs bent (I have direct knowledge of such cases).  It is impossible to document the sheer bloody misery caused by the planning system – countless examples of diminished lives.  Even well paid professional couples in London now struggle to afford dark, crumbling Victorian houses, in rough parts of town.  Houses built for costermongers and chimney sweeps in the late 19th Century.

    But it goes far beyond property prices. Soaring urban land values have a knock-on effect, raising the cost of everything, from cinema tickets to shoes.  The land and property shortage (artificially created remember) has pushed all prices up, reducing our quality of lives in a myriad of unseen ways.  Meanwhile, the few remaining patches of green in our towns and cities are fast shrinking and disappearing. Gardens are designated ‘brown-field’ sites to allow more flats and houses to be built.  Houses are horribly divided into tiny disfigured flats.  School fields, parks and squares are shrinking and disappearing at an alarming rate, extra blocks of flats spring up everywhere, like weeds in the cracks.  The shocking effect of Green Belts has been to empty our urban areas of green spaces, and yet, as State planners know fine well, these are the most cherished bits of green in Britain, giving far more people, far more pleasure than ‘the countryside’ (to which so few of us go).  Worryingly, the London Planning Advisory Committee has decided that London has room for 570,000 extra homes.  As James Heartfield pleads, ‘Do we really want every inch of London packed with houses, instead of parks, squares, playgrounds and other amenities?’  And of course transport in our congested urban areas has become a living hell.  They cram us in then prohibit us from parking anywhere and charge us for causing ‘congestion’.

    Nor is the misery confined to the towns. Green Belts have killed the countryside.  Although a gigantic amount of Britain’s land mass is reserved for agriculture, farming accounts for less than one percent of Britain’s economic activity (and even this is massively subsidised).  In the countryside itself, only 3 percent of people actually work in agriculture.  It is argued the countryside must be preserved in order to protect traditional communities and ways of life.  But there is nothing traditional about our countryside.  The vast, boring fields you see today bear no resemblance to the small, labour-intensive agriculture of old.  The landscape has changed, the ‘communities’ have changed, the economics has changed.  Nor should we idealise what went before … grovelling, impoverished tenant small-holders and agricultural labourers (and before them serfs) breaking their backs to maintain the idle gentry.   Life for the rural masses was poor, hard, dull and servile. 

    The NIMBYism of the new gentry (organised, for example, in the Council for the Protection of Rural England) has stunted and thwarted genuine economic development in the countryside.  The vast bulk of Britain is now a wasteland, a poorly attended heritage theme-park, fit for well-heeled second-homers to live out their naff rural fantasy every third weekend.  Ordinary folk in the countryside are reduced to working in National Trust postcard shops, and with their meagre wages, they struggle to afford small nasty-looking houses which face directly onto busy A-roads.  No wonder the young want to get the hell out. 

    But the battle over planning laws has nothing to do with the giant wide open spaces in Northumbria and wherever else, because no-one in their right mind wants to go and live there.   The land in dispute is in truth much smaller.  The desire for planning restrictions is really an expression of upper class disdain for suburbs, and the people who live in them and like them.  Peter Hall, the professor of planning at the Bartlett School of Architecture, in his book Cities of Tomorrow, exposes the motives behind ‘sustainable development’, which in effect means ‘pulling up the drawbridge to stop anyone else entering their well-healed enclaves (save a few select people like themselves, whom it would be quite fun to invite for drinks on Sundays) … pulling up the drawbridge against newcomers, especially if they lack the right income or right accent.’ 

    The snobbery and hatred of the suburbs dates back to the end of the 19th Century.  The railways allowed the first suburbs to flourish as the working and lower-middle-class ‘clerk’ class, experiencing prosperity for the first time, sought to escape the urban slums, to have a little house and a little garden.  The suburbs were considered vile because of the people who inhabited them. In a book called The Suburbans, written in 1905, the poet T.W.H. Crossland launched a vitriolic attack on the ‘low and inferior species’, the ‘soulless’ class of ‘clerks’ who were spreading into the new comfortable houses in the suburbs, eating tinned salmon.  He was disgusted by them, their aspiration to self improvement, offensively self-made and self-assured.

    Professor John Carey, in his magnificent book The Intellectuals and the Masses, describes the widespread upper class loathing of the newly enriched masses and their suburban ways.  In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, two characters are leaving England in an airplane. They recall Shakespeare’s description of England, ‘This precious stone set in a silver sea’, but then they look out the window.  They see the ‘straggling’ suburbs, the hills sown with bungalows, the wireless masts and overhead power cables, and ‘men and women, indiscernible except as tiny spots’ who were ‘marrying and shopping and making money and having children.’  Then one of Waugh’s characters says, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

    HG Wells contemptuously describes suburbs as a ‘tumorous growth’ … ‘ignoble’ Croydon and ‘tragic’ West Ham.  Betjeman of course pleaded to the Nazis, ‘Come friendly bombs and land on Slough, it isn’t fit for humans now’.  The suburbs were “Bathed in the yellow vomit” of sodium lamps.  Carey describes Betjeman’s horror of the suburbs, ‘harbouring the mixed bag of atrocities with which Betjeman associates with progress – radios, cars, advertisements, labour-saving homes, peroxide blondes, crooked businessmen, litter, painted toenails and people who wear public-school ties to which they are not entitled.’

    The vile lower orders had to be stopped.  It is no accident that one of the key figures in post-war planning was Sir Patrick Abercrombie, founder and head of the Council for the Protection of Rural England.  Planners like Abercrombie knew that ordinary folk were itching to escape the grimy crowded towns.  But instead of the semi-detached houses with nice back gardens, which they craved, they would have to be stacked high in tower blocks.  The planners knew that it wasn’t what people wanted.  They knew that people wanted a little space of their own, with a little back lawn where they could keep an eye on their three-year old playing.  A fairly modest, basic human desire in this day and age, you might think, and yet one they would be deprived of.

    A system of Green Belts was devised to keep the proles locked in.  Professor Hall refers to Green Belts, correctly, as ‘the polite English version of apartheid’ … ‘a system of controlling and regulating the suburban tide to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the United States’.  The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 effectively nationalised the right to develop land.  Hall describes how the containment of the lower orders in increasingly crowded urban areas, and the resulting inflation of land and property prices, led to distress on a vast scale.  Since land was so scarce and pricey, to build houses which people could actually afford, private builders were forced to build smaller and smaller homes, reducing the quality to make them less expensive.

    As the private housing market was strangled, it was decided that instead the State would build inner-city accommodation for the masses.  They were to be confined to urban areas, forced to live in high densities in high-rise blocks.  Rather than chose their own home in a free market, ordinary people had to apply to the State to be housed and would be allocated one (a very nasty State produced home).  By the 1970s around a third of the British population lived in State housing.  The State thus determined how and where we should live.  Over the years, it has become suffocating.  Green spaces inside towns have shrunk or disappeared as more and more nasty council blocks have been crammed in.  Early ‘leafy suburbs’ like Ealing have become more and more crowded and less and less leafy.  Now, they feel like part of the towns, only without the attractions of the bright lights.  In Britain, the dream of better living stopped in 1947.

    We have had enough of all this crap about ‘protecting the countryside’.  Planning (let us call it what it is: authoritarian State control of our lives) has always been primarily a tool of social prejudice.  Behind the cult of the British countryside, from Wordsworth and Ruskin onwards, has always been contempt for the masses.   Who are we protecting the ‘countryside’ for?   And from whom are we protecting it? 

    Let us be honest about ‘the countryside’.   These days it is largely made up of very big, very flat rectangular fields used for (largely pointless, subsidised) industrial farming … not at all beautiful and frankly the last place you would want to have a picnic. (Ironically most of the green rural fantasists in our midst tend to hang out in relatively crowded places like Southwold and Alderburgh (to enjoy the music festivals) and the ‘Wordsworth-country’ bit of the Lake District where Beatrix Potter lived.)

    Very few bits of the countryside look like it does in Postman Pat, and these bits are enjoyed by very few people indeed.   Let’s have more of them.  Wonderfully landscaped areas – big ones – not far from towns and suburbs, accessible to lots of people, with adjacent toilets and cafes and car-parks.  We do not want Green Belts, we want Green Patches – big parks and broad, lovely town squares, and large chunks of beautifully landscaped green spaces, close to where people live.  We want green everyone can enjoy.  And in between the green bits, we demand the freedom to build what we want, where we want. Three cheers for ‘Urban Sprawl’, the motor car, roads, supermarkets, golf courses and service stations.

    It’s time to get angry with the angry-brigade at the Telegraph.  To get angry with the organic, home-grown TV chefs and their agro-hobbyist friends, with the grungy middle class road protesters (imaging themselves to be radical), with the suburb-hating, supermarket-opposing, free-range chicken loving reactionaries, the metropolitan elite who can afford second-homes, yet who would deny first-homes to others, the heritage bores and bearded ramblers and people who drink cloudy expensive beer from local breweries and write bad guide books and erect plaques everywhere and think Ruskin had a point.  It’s time to get angry with Prince Charles – the Dark Lord, and his toady friend Richard Rogers, who thinks we should all live in shoe-boxes.  This collection of bigots are trying to keep us in our place.  They have damaged the lives of millions of people.  Now they must be stopped.

    Martin Durkin is a documentary film director and TV producer based in the UK.

    Photo from Bigstockphoto.com.

  • Urban Legend: Wei Ping Contemplates Motherhood

    Driving through the bustling Orchard Road in the heart of Singapore, Wei Ping stares at the shiny new Prada hoarding. Maybe she should ”invest” in a new Prada bag. She must watch out for the next big season sale. Her birthday is a distance away but ever since she and her husband had started talking about the baby, she needed some retail therapy to lift her mood.

    As she drives under the ERP (Electronic Road Pricing) barrier at Orchard Road at the heart of Singapore her mind shifts to the balance in her cash card and the fact that she should load it soon. Singapore, like many other cities trying to control car population, levies an entry tax every time you drive into the central business district. Every car comes fitted with a special electronic unit that can be read by the overhead ERP gantry. All that a car driver needs to do, is insert a cash card into the special unit and hope that the cash card has enough money in it to avoid being fined. The electronic gantry allows for manipulation of the ERP amount depending on the traffic. The amount to be deducted is prominently displayed on the gantry but once you are in the queue for entering the city, and realize that the balance in the cash card is lower than the entry tax you budgeted, you are in trouble with the LTA Local Transport Authority anyway in this “fine” city.

    The 30 year old prides herself in maintaining a smart yet frugal existence, the famous “kiasu” attitude of Singaporeans, which many outsiders interpret as “stinginess” but to Wei Peng is all about  getting the maximum out of a deal, the only way to go.

    Coming on top of inflated car and fuel prices as well as road tax, cost of living in one of the most modern cities in Asia tops the concerns for most people in Singapore. Worse, with rising prices, Singaporeans have to think twice before doing what they like best: upgrading housing and clothing to better housing and better clothing. In fact being kiasu, or looking out for the best deals in housing, clothing and food, is really the only smart way to survive in this expensive city. And that was the reason why Wei Peng had driven 45 minutes all the way from the heartlands (normally called suburbs) to the centre of town, braving the Friday evening crowds and struggling for 10 minutes for a parking slot, to check out the year-end deals in the shopping district.

    Wei Peng has a friend who had recently landed a job with a property developer. Fuelled by a real estate boom and resulting commissions, Diane has booked a swanky new condominium close to her current HDB (government provided) unit, significantly upgrading her lifestyle. Wei Peng would love to do the same, for that she would have loved to look for a job paying more than her current one of three years. However she knows it wouldn’t be possible, especially since her husband of two years had actively expressed interest in starting a family. The painful afterthought of financial implications of an expanding family was all she could think about lately.

    For years now, Singapore has been struggling with a declining birth rate. The government has tried to stem it with cash incentives, extended post-pregnancy leave and open immigration policies with limited success at best.

    The Singapore of today is faced with twin problems of slowing birth rate and ageing population. In 2000, 14% of women between age 30-39 chose to remain childless. By 2009, this figure has gone up to 20%. A similar trend was seen in the 40-49 year age group. In a country with a life expectancy of 81 years, the age support ratio or the ratio of working age population (15-64) to the elderly (65+) has declined from 9.9 in the year 2000 to 8.2 in 2009. (Source: Singstat.gov.sg)

    In human terms this translates into a no escape from cost of living even after retirement. There is no cheaper “hinterland” they can migrate to. The newspapers are full of stories of ungrateful children and abandoned elderly parents. A recent government campaign talks of family values and of children fulfilling their duties towards their parents. Wei Peng, who is an only child, knows she has to think of taking in her parents in to live with her someday. And for her husband, it means sharing the duties of “filial piety”, as the campaign calls it, with his younger siblings.

    Most of her friends were not keen to become parents anytime soon. The few who did relied on their retired mothers and fathers but she could not think of imposing on her parents’ lifestyle. She saw a close friend go through one child after another in quick succession and finally decided to quit her flourishing career in the private sector. Her friend’s life is now consumed with the tension of getting admissions into a reputed school, and hustling the children into “special classes” ranging from music to sports. They don’t talk on the topic but for Wei Peng the thought of giving up her own ambitions hurts. Not to mention the small sacrifices like giving up on the comforts of a car for the city’s clean, efficient but often very crowded public transport.

    After all, starting a family meant having to plan for one less income, at least for some time,  and additional expenses indefinitely. For instance, raising a child would mean hiring a full-time nanny. Finding a nanny is easy, thanks to Government policies that allow “domestic workers” to live and work in Singapore. However, keeping a nanny means paying the government two hundred odd dollars as tax, not including the worker’s salary and the cost of her upkeep. Having a baby would also drive a more disciplined lifestyle.

    Right now, she’s cooked in her kitchen precisely two times, once for Chinese New Year and the other when her husband’s parents had come over. It was simply more convenient and maybe even cheaper to eat out at the various hawker centers/food courts conveniently scattered across the city. Of course eating out came with the added attraction of hanging out with like-minded friends, especially over the weekend. She looked forward to scouring the papers for a new restaurant review that could potentially be the weekend outing.

    With a baby, the look of her pristine kitchen would definitely change. Was she ready to stop looking after that lovely coffee machine and the induction cooker which looked like it belonged in a show flat even after two years?

    No eating-out, no annual holiday, increased expenses, maybe missing that promotion she so wanted…where were the positives to motherhood?

    As she drove into the overcrowded car park filled with deal seeking crowd, her glance fell on the road tax sticker stuck to the windshield. The expiry date was within 15 days! Oh well, she sighs, another day, and another expense. Prada will have to wait for a while and the baby, a while longer.

    Note: Wei Peng is fictitious but Singapore’s baby problems are real.

    Vatsala Pant is a management graduate with several years of business leadership experience and a connoisseur of people, places and cultures. She currently lives in Singapore.

    Photo of Singapore ERP system by Flickr user choyaw99.