Category: housing

Why Affordable Housing Matters

Economists, planners and the media often focus on the extremes of real estate — the high-end properties or the foreclosed deserts, particularly in the suburban fringe. Yet to a large extent, they ignore what is arguably the most critical issue: affordability.

This problem is the focus of an important new study by Demographia. The study, which focuses largely on English-speaking countries, looks at the price of housing relative to household income. It essentially benchmarks the number of years of a region’s household income required to purchase a median-priced house.

Overall, the results are rather dismal in terms of affordability, particularly in what Wharton’s Joe Gyourko dubs “superstar cities.” These places — such as London, New York, Sydney, Toronto and Los Angeles — generally tend to be more expensive than second-tier regions commonly found in the American South and heartland.

Even with their usually higher incomes, these regions, for the most part, still have a ratio of five years median income to median house price; this is far higher than the historical ratio of three. In some areas the ratios are even more stratospheric. Sydney and Melbourne, for example, have ratios over nine; London, New York, San Jose and Los Angeles approach six or more.

Urbanists often assume that these high prices — unprecedented in a tepid economy — reflect the greater attractiveness of these regions. This is somewhat true, particularly for parts of London and New York, which can survive high ratios because their markets are less national and middle-income and more tied to the global upper classes.

In places like Mayfair or New York’s Upper East Side, the buying “public” extends beyond the local market to high-income markets in places like the United Arab Emirates, Moscow, Shanghai, Singapore or Tokyo. Many owners are not full-time residents and consider a home in such places as just another expression of their wealth and privilege.

Yet such markets are exceptional. In most regions, the vast preponderance of homebuyers are either natives or long-term migrants. Their less glamorous tastes — notably access to affordable single-family dwellings — drives migration from one region to another. Over the past decade, and even since the crash, this has meant a general trend of migration from high-end, unaffordable markets to less expensive regions. In the U.S., for example, people have been flocking to the South, particularly the large metropolitan areas of Texas.

One factor driving this migration, the Demographia study reveals, is differing levels of regulation of land use between regions. In many markets advocacy for “smart growth,” with tight restrictions on development on the urban fringe, has tended to drive up prices even in places like Australia, despite the relatively plentiful supply of land near its major cities.

More recently, “smart growth” has been bolstered by claims, not always well founded, that high-density development is better for the environment, particularly in terms of limiting greenhouse gases. Fighting climate change (aka global warming) has given planning advocates, politicians and their developer allies a new rationale for “cramming” people into more dense housing, even though most surveys show an overwhelming preference for less dense, single-family houses in most major markets across the English-speaking world.

Limits on the kind of residential living most people prefer inevitably raises prices. As the Demographia study shows, the highest rise in prices relative to incomes generally has taken place in wherever strong growth controls have been imposed by local authorities.

Perhaps the poster child for “smart growth” has been the U.K. Long before the climate change debate, both of England’s major parties embraced the notion of strict constraints on suburban development — not only in London, but across the country. As a result, even places with weak economies are not as affordable as they should be. Liverpool, Newcastle and the Midlands have affordability rates higher than Toronto, Boston, Miami and Portland — and not much lower than those of New York or Los Angeles.

But the most remarkable impact of “smart growth” policies has been in Australia, which once had among the most affordable housing prices in the English-speaking world. Houses in Sydney and Melbourne, for example, are now less affordable than in London or San Francisco. Even secondary markets like Adelaide and Perth are more expensive than Toronto, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Most recently these policies have even caught the attention of the OECD, which linked overly regulated housing markets not only to the Great Recession, but to a continued slow economic recovery.

Compared with the U.K. and Australia, the U.S. housing market is more hopeful, with a host of regions — notably Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Phoenix and Kansas City — with affordability rates around three and under. Low prices by themselves, of course, are no guarantor of success; in economically challenged places like Detroit and Cleveland, out-migration and high unemployment have driven prices down.

But in many, if not most, cases affordability has promoted economic and demographic growth. Generally speaking, affordable markets tend to draw migrants from overpriced ones, for example to Houston or Austin from Los Angeles or New York.

Nor is this necessarily a case of “smart” people heading to dense, expensive cities while the less cognitively gifted head to the low-cost regions — as news outlets like The Atlantic have claimed. In fact, the American Community Survey reveals that between 2007 and 2009 college graduates generally gravitated toward lower-cost, less dense markets — such as Austin, Houston and Nashville — than to the highly constrained, denser ones. Overall growth in affordable markets — with a ratio of three or four — among college graduates was roughly 5%; in the more expensive places , it was barely 3%.

How could this be, if everyone with an above-a-room-temperature IQ supposedly favors hip, cool, dense cities? Perhaps it’s because of factors often too small or mundane for urban pundits to acknowledge. Most people, particularly as they enter their 30s, aspire to a middle-class lifestyle — and being able to afford a house constitutes a large part of that.

So what does this tell us about future growth? Clearly affordability matters. Areas that combine strong income and job growth, along with affordable housing, are poised to do best. This will be particularly true once the economy recovers and a new generation of millennial buyers, entering their 30s in huge numbers over the next decade, start their search for a place where they can settle down and start raising families.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

Photo by Je Kemp

January 24, 2011
Irvine, by Design

Different is not necessarily better or worse. I took notice of this upon moving from the Echo Park district of Los Angeles to Irvine. Some acquaintances and casual observers viewed it as a shift from ground zero of hipster chic to the center of conformity. Neither comes close to capturing the truth about either place.

Irvine is very different from Echo Park—not necessarily better or worse. That’s my point of view as a resident who appreciates aspects of both places.

Here’s a viewpoint from a broader perspective: I can see why a lot of observers and even some residents of Irvine see the city as a paean to conformity. The cityscape obviously conforms to any number of standards, some of which seem to be downright capricious. Must earth tones dominate the palette of the entire city? Must opportunities for legal U-turns be so rare?

There’s no denying that anyone who’s unfamiliar gets little help from landmarks as they find their way around Irvine. A lot of the streets have a similar look and feel. Many are bigger and busier than they seem at first glance. Cars are the boss, and it can take a while to get one’s bearings amid the slight distinctions of streetscape and zippy pace of traffic.

It’s taking me awhile, but a few things are coming into focus. I find it helps to think of the city as a canvas and to get to know its brush strokes.

There is a street grid, with major thoroughfares generally oriented on north to south and east to west. It helps to think of them as freeways. The housing subdivisions are like small towns. The shopping centers are downtown commercial districts.

Get that in mind and it helps put the city in perspective. Once you put Irvine in perspective you begin to realize its design.

Yes, the city is designed to a T—so much so that the “conformity” tag gets affixed by critics in gentrified neighborhoods filled with hipsters, including many who don’t realize that they themselves have gotten comfortable with uniformity.

Listen closely to those same critics and you’ll realize they actually crave the sort of design that defines Irvine. Go to a community meeting in a gentrified neighborhood and you’ll likely hear all sorts of calls for strict design standards on everything from signs for mom-and-pop stores to street lights and dog parks.

The difference between the design-obsessed enclaves of inner cities and Irvine owes to Donald Bren.

His Irvine Company shares its name with the city. He grew it out of acreage that had been the historic Irvine Ranch. Bren’s vast landholdings have given him an unusual scope of control over how Irvine has taken shape.

Bren is apparently obsessed with design. It’s also apparent, however, that his obsession works toward a clear purpose. He seeks a profit in the marketplace.

The same hipsters who knock Irvine for conformity should appreciate the profit motive. Many of them look back fondly on pages of history that tell the stories of captains of industry who built company headquarters, stores and even factories as monuments and legacies.

Ask a hipster about the Chrysler Building in New York or the Wrigley Building in Chicago. Get ready for a stream-of-conscious review of the elegance of those structures. You’ll hear about the glory days of magnates who were not beholden to quarterly profit reports and could freely direct their wealth to aesthetic pleasures for public view without questions from shareholders.

You won’t hear Bren mentioned, but he should be.

I know this much from my brief time in Irvine: The place is a big canvas, and much of it has been filled by Bren. The conformity that critics see actually is design. It just happens to be on such a grand scale that it requires a broader perspective than can be gained with drive through and a look around. You have to live with it awhile—or perhaps take it in from several thousand feet in the air.

Nobody has to like Bren’s design. Fair is fair, though, and it should be understood that nothing of the scale and scope of what Bren has created can be fairly called conformity.

Sullivan is managing editor of the Orange County Business Journal (ocbj.com), where this column originally appeared.

Photo by maziar hooshmand

January 22, 2011
GIS and Online Mapping: Stretching the Truth Scale

When I began my land planning career in 1968, one of the first things I learned about was the use of the Rubber Scale. What is it? Rubber Scale was a term used by civil engineers and land surveyors to describe an inaccurate plan that ignored the physical limitations of the existing terrain. To say that the planner or architect had used a Rubber Scale to create a beautifully rendered plan with pastel colors and soft shadows cast from tree stamps was a negative comment, since these plans were pretty much worthless to the engineer and surveyor that had to make the plans conform to regulations. Because the lines were hand drawn back then (and in many cases still are today), accuracy was, and remains, an issue.

I was guilty of “stretching the scale” to maximize density, thus the term. The rubber scale was beloved by designers who wanted to look good to their developer clients. The developer expected a plan that maximized yield, and a plan that was of a higher density than they expected would surely be pleasing. Of course, these plans had no basis in reality. Ultimately, the land surveyors and civil engineers would lose the units we falsely claimed, and they would also get blamed for the density loss!

Fast forward two decades to 1988, when GIS (Geographic Information Systems) began gaining market share. Government agencies (typically cities and counties) embarked on spending sprees with the promise of a new era in planning technology brought on by the advent and proliferation of the GIS technology, which blended graphic mapping information with a data base. You wanted to know property information, demographics, soil types? Just query the map. The sales teams of GIS mapping systems convinced those in charge of purchasing that “parcels” shown on the map could be traced quickly from a variety of sources, then later “rubber sheeted” into accurate surveyed section corners. As if by magic, inaccurate parcels would be made precise.

So— early, existing hand drawn maps were traced into a computer, and the imprecise data was made even more imprecise. Even when the data came from aerial maps, created by flights several thousand feet above the surface, the accuracy was at best within three to five feet of actual location. What happens to curved boundary lines if the map is stretched to meet tens of thousands (or more) of lot corners, with all four section corners set accurately? The answer is, of course, a map that would be impractical to correct at a later date. Very few GIS maps exist today that were done using accurate land survey from the beginning.

Fast forward another two decades and more to today, when Google Earth and its rivals, MapQuest and BingMaps, have unfortunately become the basis for site information. Call the data of these suppliers “on-line graphics”. There are a variety of software systems that boast that site layout can easily be done using on-line-graphics, or simply using the available on-line GIS mapping data.

Here lies today’s problem: None of this information is likely to be accurate enough to be useful to an engineer or surveyor who ultimately must put their license on the drawing, guaranteeing its accuracy.

GIS salesman make their sales commissions by convincing the world’s governments that data can be “adjusted” later to a more accurate data structure. This is true, but not economically feasible or practical. Since curved property lines are represented in a GIS system by a series of miniscule lines, it could be possible for the data to be corrected. This is like saying that it could be possible to temporarily build an approximate building and later on move walls to the locations shown on the plan. It would be possible, yes, but hardy cost (and time) effective.

A lack of correct information is a huge problem when using GIS or on-line-graphics information. For example, it’s not possible to see contour lines that are accurate enough to determine flood plain, wetlands, or other information critical to the initial site design. Even when this information is shown on the city or county on-line map, what is the source of that data? Most of these maps are sourced to the lowest bidder. Was that wetland shown on the site just something that looked wet on an aerial map traced by a low-bidding draftsman, or was the wetland defined by an environmental expert who accurately surveyed it and somehow placed it precisely on the GIS map? This is the modern day version of using a rubber scale to measure the very data used to make decisions. Entire cities are stretched beyond practical use by surveyors and engineers.

Many think that the on-line-graphics are taken from a satellite in space with some military camera that spy agencies use. Wrong! The images are derived from aerial mapping firms. These photographs might be several years old, which is why you might look at a newly developed suburban area, while the map still shows a farm field. You could be looking at a site to build residential units, not realizing a sewage treatment plant was recently built next door.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a way for architects, engineers, contractors and owners to communicate and collaborate while designing a structure they are all involved in creating. The various parties can be instantly communicating worldwide on a single project located anywhere. Recently, I was participating in an on-line conference from one of the suppliers of BIM technology, who wanted to sell me on the idea of using BIM as an additional tool to use with our precision site design software. I require a developer to furnish us with an accurately surveyed boundary, topography, and any wetlands delineated precisely on the site before I begin my work. The BIM supplier took an office building from Florida (created accurately), and placed it on a site in South Dakota shown by Google Maps as if somehow that’s all there is to planning. Nowhere in the conversation did the salesman mention local regulations, site restrictions, where any easements might be (most often easements are not easily seen in photographs), etc. As soon as I was shown how a building from Florida could be placed on a site in a northern state using an on-line-graphics data base as the planning solution, the demonstration was over. Could BIM be used for site design? Absolutely, but only by using precision data from qualified engineers and surveyors, not on-line-graphics.

The tax payers have financed billions of dollars worth of GIS systems with map data of questionable accuracy, with the understanding that the rough mapping data could be rectified accurately later. While true, the cost of converting existing maps would be prohibitive. The general public might think that these public data structures replace the need for land surveys and accurate civil engineering. But these vague images actually make it even more important to consult with a licensed professional to provide precision data before any design or development decisions are made.

Over four decades ago I was guilty of using the rubber scale. New technology has promoted us into a new problem, and moved us from a rubber scale to a rubber sheeted world.

Photo by edibleoffice: GIS of Hayes Valley, San Francisco.

Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

January 14, 2011
The Urban Energy Efficiency Retrofit Challenge

I was welcomed home to Chicago from visiting family on Christmas Day by a cold house and a gas furnace that wasn’t working. The next day a repair tech gave me the bad news about a blown circuit board that would cost over $500 to replace. But I heard that were was a $1500 tax credit for energy efficient upgrades that was expiring at year end. With $2000 in “free money” to spend, I thought maybe furnace replacement might be a better option. At eight years old, the furnace might have more years of life. But it was a “developer special” – that is, a basic workhorse model that was not particularly energy efficient – only 80% Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE) rated – or with other features I might like. My hot water heater dated to the same time and was probably closer to needing to be replaced, so why not do them both at the same time? Maybe I would even go super-enviro friendly with a tankless model water heater.

This is exactly what the stimulus was supposed to be stimulating. Unfortunately, the reality didn’t work out like I thought it would, and in a way that shows the challenge of doing energy efficiency retrofits in urban areas.

I had my heating company come out to give me an estimate on replacement for my furnace and hot water heater. Immediately, I learned that there were problems. Chief among them is that newer, energy efficient systems recycle heat that previously went up the chimney. This makes their exhaust much cooler, and requires special chimney pipes that are plastic, not metal. My old chimney wouldn’t work, nor could a new pipe be inserted through it, since my water heater and furnace shared a chimney and there wasn’t room to install all the piping needed. They’d have to punch new holes in my roof. I’m on the top floor of my 14 unit building, which means this is actually doable, but it would cost money and require getting permission from my association. It’s also not something I’d want to take on in the winter unless absolutely required. And, as it turns out, I might not have a big enough gas line required to feed regardless tankless water heater. Tankless units consume less energy overall, but they do burst at higher output, requiring heftier gas supplies.

I decided to just fix the circuit board.

According to the heating company, if I lived in a single family home, this would probably have all been a non-issue. First, no permission would be needed from anyone, and generally furnaces and such are located where you can just punch an exhaust line directly out the side of the house. This makes upgrading a snap. But since I’m in an urban multi-unit building, things aren’t so easy. What’s more, even though I and the other person who live on the top floor might be able to make an upgrade happen, the other 12 units below us will never be able to upgrade to energy efficient heating because it is impossible for them to run new chimney pipes to the roof. That is, unless a new generation of technology vents through older metal chimney pipes. In essence, then, my building is permanently precluded from installing high efficiency heating – although the structure is less than a decade old.

Gas forced air is the standard heating solution for new construction in Chicago and much of the Midwest. This may not apply to the largest buildings, but certainly to single family homes and most of the new construction condos in Chicago. Being able to upgrade building systems is key to energy efficiency, because buildings are the number one source of carbon emissions. In the city of Chicago, about 70% of all carbon emissions come from buildings. And while multi-unit buildings may be inherently more efficient in some regards, they create huge challenges for upgrades because of all the shared infrastructure and lack of access to the roof, exterior walls, and utility feeds. This might not apply in some cases where there is, for example, a shared boiler where one upgrade takes care of all units. But for most new construction condos outside of high rises, I strongly suspect they were built without energy efficient furnaces and in a way that effectively precludes upgrading to current technology.

This shows the need for infrastructure and buildings that are designed to physically evolve over time. With rapidly changing technology, a “build once for the ages” approach is no longer appropriate. Even if codes were changed to require energy efficient heating at the time of construction or the installation of provisions for gas supply and venting, it would only deal with the here and now. We’d be fools to believe we are never going to want to upgrade things again in the future.

The things we buy become obsolete more rapidly than ever. Consumer electronics companies have solved this with a short product cycles and rapidly declining costs that assumes the things you buy will be disposable. We should think about this principle as applied to buildings, but we’re probably a long way off from that.

This is a difficult challenge and one that requires significant thought and trial and error as technology doesn’t always evolve like we think it will. I was very proud of myself for being forward looking enough to run network cabling to every room when I renovated an 1898 house back in the 1990s. A few years later wireless rendered that investment in wires itself obsolete.

But it’s worth the effort to try to find a solution. From our highways and transit systems, to water and sewer lines, to our buildings, we are facing a huge overhang of required replacements and upgrades, much of the cost driven by a need to bring designs up to new, modern design requirements and the state of the art. We could spend an enormous amount of money doing this only to find ourselves right back in the same boat a few decades down the road when things are old again, and society’s desires and technology have moved on to the next generation. In an era of ever greater technology change, finding a way to ride the upgrade curve effectively is an imperative.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile.

Photo by Ron Zack

January 12, 2011
Fuzzy Thinking by Famous Economists

Edward L. Glaeser, in an end-of-year piece for the New York Times, claims that generous housing supply is the reason that Texas’s economy is performing so well. As he says in his final paragraph:

“Housing regulations, more than those that bind standard businesses, explain the Sun Belt’s population growth. If New York and Massachusetts want to stop losing Congressional seats, then they must revisit the rules that make it so difficult to build. High prices show that the demand would be there if the supply is unleashed.”

This can’t be true.

If it were true, Fresno, Modesto, and other cities in California’s Central Valley would be booming. They are not. Instead, six of the ten worst U.S. Metro Areas for joblessness are in California’s Central Valley.

It is not just California. There are lots of places where housing is abundant and inexpensive and economic activity is dismal, Michigan for example. Maybe bringing up Michigan is a little unfair, Glaeser does mention demand for housing in the essay, and there is clearly little demand for Michigan housing. Still, it brings up the question of where demand for housing comes from. It’s a question Glaeser does not address.

We’ll get back to the question of demand for housing.

Glaeser claims that building homes causes prosperity, but Michigan’s housing abundance is not because of recent construction. He mentioned Georgia and Arizona, but those economies have been performing worse than the national average in terms of jobs and unemployment since the crash of the housing bubble. Now Nevada leads the nation in the AP’s Economic Stress Index, the sum of unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy rates.

As it turns out, Texas is the only state among the ones that Glaeser discusses that has outperformed the national average since the recession. Something else is going on, and that something is opportunity, but Glaeser makes a fundamental mistake early in the paper:

“If economic productivity – created by low regulations or anything else – was causing the growth of Texas, Arizona and Georgia, then these places should have high per capita productivity and wages. Yet per capita state product in Arizona in 2009 was $35,300, 16 percent less than the national average. Per capita state products was $36,700 in Georgia and $42,500 in Texas.”

It is a mindboggling mistake for an economist to claim that business decisions are made based on productivity, without consideration of costs. If productivity was all that mattered, little manufacturing would take place in China, as United States factory workers are about five times more productive than their Chinese counterparts.

Paul Krugman, in another New York Times piece, takes up where Glaeser leaves off and makes another amazing mistake:

“Part of the answer is that reports of a recession-proof state were greatly exaggerated. It’s true that Texas job losses haven’t been as severe as those in the nation as a whole since the recession began in 2007. But Texas has a rapidly growing population — largely, suggests Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, because its liberal land-use and zoning policies have kept housing cheap. There’s nothing wrong with that; but given that rising population, Texas needs to create jobs more rapidly than the rest of the country just to keep up with a growing work force.”

Krugman goes on to say that people move to cheap housing, and economic growth follows.

People make locational decisions based on far more factors than housing costs, factors like job prospects and opportunity, climate, cultural amenities, taxes and the like. In economic terms, we say that job growth and population growth are jointly determined. There is nothing sequential going on at all. Instead, population growth (and housing demand) reflects job growth prospects, housing costs, and other factors. Job growth reflects population growth prospects (and housing supply), productivity, wage rates, and other costs and resources.

Krugman also asserts that Texas’s economy is not exceptional among the large states, citing unemployment rates equal to New York or Massachusetts. But he ignores the fundamentals here – like higher job growth and more in-migration. During its boom period, California often suffered higher unemployment because so many people were coming there. In contrast, the workforces in both Massachusetts and New York are among the slowest growing in the country. New York, in particular, competes with California and Michigan for the highest rates of domestic outmigration. People would stay if there was opportunity.

In his rush to denounce Texas, Krugman exaggerates or dismisses facts. Yes, Texas has a twenty billion deficit now, but that the Lone Star State budget is for two years, something he neglects to mention. These estimates may soon be downgraded, as the price of oil rises. In addition, he fails to acknowledge Texas’s stellar performance in creating both high-tech and middle skill jobs at many times the rate of such favored blue states as Massachusetts, New York and California. People are not as stupid as many Nobel Prize winners might think; they move for opportunity, not just for cheap houses or low-paid work.

You do not have to be a free market fundamentalist to recognize that, in relative terms, we can see a band of prosperity from North Dakota to Texas. In general, economic performance declines as you move from this Heartland band to the coasts, particularly the West Coast. People who want to believe that policy doesn’t matter give oil and agriculture as the two major reasons for the Heartland’s relative prosperity. Krugman suggests that high oil prices are a key reason for Texas’s economic performance.

No doubt, oil is important to Texas, but prices have been generally low throughout the recession, while the oil companies’ domestic capital budgets have been small. Similarly, agriculture is booming nationwide, not just in the Heartland, a result of high prices caused by growing global demand. California certainly has lots of oil and agriculture, and no one would claim that California is booming. There is more to the Heartland’s growth than agriculture and oil, and that includes states which are governed by Democrats, such as Montana.

A region’s job growth is a result of business locational decisions. A business moves to or expands in a region based on a whole host of reasons. These include available infrastructure, resource availability, market size and location, labor supply and costs, worker productivity, facilities costs, transportation costs, and other costs. Those other costs include what I call DURT (Delay, Uncertainty, Regulation, and Taxes).

There is no reason for every location to have the same DURT. On the contrary, a location blessed with an abundance of the other factors of business locational decisions could afford to have more expensive DURT, while locations less blessed need to have cheaper DURT to attract businesses.

This is what we see. The coasts tend to be more intrinsically attractive than the Heartland, but they also tend to have more expensive DURT. But now many of these states – driven by such factors as public sector costs or environmental regulations – have raised the price of their DURT so high that they have driven business to expand more to less attractive locations with cheaper DURT, demonstrating once again that policy matters.

Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org.

Photo by Dean Terry

January 8, 2011
Coalition of the Unwilling

This week the UK government announced an ”end to anti-car policies” reversing the guidance to local authorities to dissuade citizens from using their cars in favour of public transport. Charges for parking will be reined in, they promise.

It should be good news. The comically-named ”traffic calming” schemes put in place by the outgoing government were deeply unpopular. Still, we are getting used to taking our announcements from the new coalition government with a pinch of salt.

Before the election Housing Minister Grant Shapps backed demands from the Housebuilders’ Federation for a ‘right to build’. That might seem unnecessary, but in Britain the planning laws are so prohibitive that owning land extends no right to build upon it. Instead planning authorities extend permission to build where it meets the terms of the local plan.

The impact of Britain’s planning laws has always been a problem, but for the last thirteen years the ‘local plan’ has been hi-jacked by anti-growth campaigners from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Urban Taskforce and the massed ‘NIMBY’ campaigners of the Tory Shires.

The new local government minister Eric Pickles explained that the net effect of the planning system’s strangle hold on house building was that ”we’re at rock bottom”: ”1924 was the last time we built this little number of houses”. His Labour predecessor Nick Raynsford had ”done more damage than the Luftwaffe”, said Pickles, exaggerating a little, but making his point (Sunday Times, 12 September 2010).

So what about the changes? Grant Shapps’s published policy does include the words ”right to build” – but they are heavily hedged about:

”provided that [the new homes and buildings] conform to national environmental, architectural, economic and social standards, conform with the local plan, and pay a tariff that compensates the community for loss of amenity and costs of additional infrastructure’ (Open Source Planning, Page 3).

All of which sounds pretty much as bad as it was before. What right to build, you might ask? Indeed the words ‘right to build’ feature just once in the document, as quoted above, in the executive summary. There is a question mark, too, over who it is that has the right to build. ”Communities”, according to Shapps, and the government have the right, but just how these ”communities” are defined is not clear. More likely they will be the same planning authorities as before. In that case the only developers that get a look in will be the powerful and well-connected like Tesco or Barratt Homes – those who are in a position to meet the municipal fathers’ demands for baksheesh… or ”planning gain” as it is known in the UK.

Coalitions are new to Britain (apart from one shaky Liberal-Labour government in the seventies). But with neither David Cameron’s Conservative Party, nor the deeply demoralised Labour Party of Gordon Brown winning enough votes to command a majority in the House of Commons, Cameron had to turn to Nick Clegg’s minority Liberal Democrats.

This arrangement seems to suit Cameron. Cameron became leader on a pledge to lose the ”nasty party” image the Conservatives had after years of office in the 1980s. His method is a mirror image of Tony Blair’s repositioning of the Labour Party as a centre party by distancing it from its socialist roots. First we had a Labour government that was against socialism. Now we have a Conservative-led government that is shy about capitalism.

Sidelining the old-school Thatcherite, free market Tories in favour of his friends in the public relations, media and volunteer sector, Cameron seems obsessed with changing the party brand.Although this did not work in the election, the advantage of an alliance with the Liberal Democrats means that he can ditch whatever fundamentalist free market doctrines whenever convenient on the grounds that ”coalition government is compromise”.

The net effect is a government that keeps sounding as if it is going to do something decisive, but then doesn’t.

The greatest challenge has been the state of the public finances. Britain’s government debts are astonishing: one trillion pounds sterling, or 68.2 per cent of GDP. Since most of the debt was contracted under Labour’s watch, the coalition government has the moral high ground. The Labour coalition says that the cuts announced in the public sector put the recovery in danger because they are too far, too fast. They stand by ”counter-cyclical” spending, but Labour has little mainstream credibility in terms of the country’s finances.

For the left, though, balancing the capitalists’ books is hardly the issue. They are looking forward to a re-run of the campaign against the Thatcher public spending cuts of the 1980s. The protests and banners all seem to reinforce the idea that the government is indeed planning to rein in public spending, but it is not. As former Tory Minister John Redwood has pointed out, the planned cuts are not even cuts at all, but a limit on spending growth.

Cameron’s government had to sound tough on public spending, because the bond traders were in fear of Britain’s debt rating being marked down, and the wider impact of a loss of confidence. With both Greece and Ireland’s finances in trouble, the British government needed to promise stability.

But the same city traders are just as determined that the spending party should carry on, even if the volume is turned down to avoid scaring the neighbours. For years Britain’s ”private sector” has been dependent on extraordinary boosts of government cash. Under the outgoing government’s Private Finance Initiative, public institutions like hospitals and schools were allowed to raise funds by issuing their own bonds, debt that was not reckoned in the official accounts. Then Gordon Brown’s banking bailout found government buying up failing banks like Royal Bank of Scotland.

Despite their fawning support for austerity Britain’s City traders still expect to be looked after. The Bank of England’s emergency policy to meet the shortage of credit in the economy is called ”quantitative easing”. In practice it means that the government trades government bonds for the banks’ own toxic debts, while bond traders make money on the commission.

Even the one controversial cut in public spending turns out to be something more like a gift to the banks. The government says that they will let universities charge fees approaching the market rate, and that students will no longer be subsidised. Since those who made the decision all got to go to university for free, the backlash was understandable – the kind of rioting Saturnalia that Britons indulge in from time to time (“off with their heads!“ shouted student rioters when they chanced upon the Prince of Wales’s limousine and mobbed it, while running from the police).

To moderate the impact of the fees, though, the government has promised to expand the student loans scheme, where the State lends the money, and then recovers it later, through the tax system. For the banks, what could be more perfect? Here is a tranche of debt created overnight, guaranteed by a government that undertakes to recover it on their behalf: More of a subsidy to the City of London than a cut in government spending.

Though the Conservatives are thought of as ”Thatcher’s Children”, they behave much more like their ”New Labour” predecessors. The tough talk is for show.

Nowhere is this proto-New Labour approach clearer than on energy policy. Although Energy Minister Chris Huhne has acknowledged that Britain faces severe electricity shortages – he fails to ascribe the problem to its proximate cause, the failure to build enough coal-powered power stations.

Huhne’s solution, though, will make things worse. Not more coal-powered stations, but a government imposed increase on tariffs for fossil-fuel generated power, and a special allowance for renewable energy. Of course, renewable energy on any normal pricing system would be uneconomic. Britain’s latest windmills even had to be heated up to stop them freezing solid this winter. The net effect of Huhne’s proposal: no fix for the energy shortage, and more expensive electricity.

These policies have had disastrous, even lethal, results. According to the latest figures, excess winter deaths in the UK are in the region of 25 000, most of them the elderly, often hastened along by fuel poverty. With Huhne’s proposals, those numbers are set to increase, as electricity becomes something of a luxury to the poor.

At least in this area, the Tories are “conservative”. The tradition of the poor freezing to death in wintertime is being restored, and so too may be the old class system that allows the City to enrich itself as the expense of everyone else, including the taxpayers.

James Heartfield is the author of Let’s Build: Why we need five million new homes, a director of Audacity.org, and a member of the 250 New Towns Club.

Photo by Chris Devers

January 7, 2011
Faith-Based City Planning: Exorcising the Suburban Dream
We’re coming to the end of the season when we focus a great deal of attention on faith. What is faith? The Biblical definition calls it the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1, KJV). Humans have the capacity to firmly believe in something that cannot be explained by reason and is not visibly evident. Faith is the basis of the world’s major religions, and often is a cause for war, and today, terrorism. But though the season of faith may be winding down, there is still a place where faith remains strong year round: It is often the basis of the way we plan our communities.

Over the past two decades, our city planning has become faith based. A new preacher has evolved in the form of the Architect or Planner who evangelizes to the congregation that they can all live in serenity if they have faith in the teachings. Their sermons of architectural commandments introduce dimensional ratios that can deliver a utopian existence, promising a wonderland for families.

To enforce faith, you of course need an evil entity to oppose. The evil entity in the faith of land planning is The Suburbs. Those that believe in the suburbs are inherently evil and must be converted or they may spend eternity dammed to a cul-de-sac. The automobile is sacrificed on this altar, with the chant “Space – Space – Space”.

Converts to this faith include many if not most, politicians (not just liberals), architects, planners, environmentalists, movie stars, and many in the press. Those that have not converted yet include land developers, builders, city council and planning commission members, and the majority of the home buying market.

Some of the principles this faith are as follows:
- Thou shalt build upon thy dwelling a porch of such magnitude that it can serve as a gathering place.
- Thou shalt construct a path of 2 cubits (approximately 4 feet) wide near thy porch for followers to meet and pray that a cul-de-sac shall not influence thy offspring.
- A place for chariots shall be placed upon the buttocks of thy dwelling. Thy chariot must not be nearer to the dwelling than 4 cubits or thee will be smitten.
- Thou shall plant a tree half a cubit from thy curb and in front of thy porch.
- Create a place for gathering no farther than 600 cubits from thy dwelling.
- Thy dwelling shall have Craftsman trim.
- The path to heaven is taken by bicycle, light rail, or walking, not by powered chariot.
- A congregant must dwell in extreme closeness to thy neighbor.
Myself? I’m a disbeliever; a heretic who thinks there is no place in the design of our cities and neighborhoods for this belief system to be regulated or enforced. If development companies are believers, then by all means let them develop their land in such a manner, as they will have the faith that homes will sell to those that also believe.

The danger arises when Federal funding is tied to the faith, on the basis that developments of extreme density will surely result in less vehicular miles traveled and a more healthy environment for human creatures. Do not follow this faith, and good luck getting funded. Is this the American way?

I do not believe the automobile is evil, and I’m thankful that I live in an era where I can think nothing of traveling 20, 30, 40 miles or even 400 miles. A hundred years ago my ancestors had no such luxury.

I am thankful that I live in a place that offers a sense of space, yet is not too distant from neighbors and services. I am especially thankful for choice. Yes, there is a coffee shop about a 10 minute walk away, but a three minute drive will get me to a coffee shop that offers more tasty drinks at lower costs.

Looking outside, I see two feet of new snow. I’m especially thankful that I do not have to use our icy walks in the sub-zero temperatures, and wait for the bus that connects downtown to the bus that would take me to within a ¼ mile of my office. Yes I’m thrilled to have a 5 minute drive to work instead of an hour bus ride (buses connect downtown, not in the burbs). Of course, those with faith believe that exposure to sub-zero weather and walking along icy surfaces is somehow healthier.

I lack the faith that extreme density without car ownership is a better way. As a disbeliever, I cannot find the faith to believe children being brought up in high-density, high-rise projects have the same quality of life as those brought up in homes with a secure and safe yard to play in. I cannot find the faith that living in high rise rentals is an American Dream.

I do believe the consumer will not flock to this new life of high density living. Yes, New York today is a somewhat exciting place to visit, but just a few decades ago it was a truly awful place. What will it be like two decades from now? Will it be a great place to live for those on the lower side of “middle income”?

I believe there is no magic architectural solution to create a better society – none. There is no special setback, density, or building-to- street ratio that can somehow provide a better life. There is no software button one can press to analyze land use and, bingo, spit out a solution. To believe that any of formula of that sort could be workable takes faith, a faith that is apparently held by many.

I also believe that it’s simply untrue that the suburbs are not walkable. In the southern states, most cities demand walks to be constructed on both sides of the street. Because of snow, as one ventures north, walkways become less mandated. I have visited (and not on a press tour) the developments of the faith of land planning: I’On, Kentlands, Celebration, SeaSide, WaterColor, etc. What I’ve observed is that there seem to be no more or less people walking than what I have seen in conventional suburbs. On these visits I have never seen a single person sitting on his or her front porch – not one.

Yet I do believe that a full front porch is important for two reasons. The first is that it connects the living spaces to the street, and it can be used to congregate. But secondly, there is a warmth to a neighborhood of homes that have full porches. It adds character, compared to the coldness of a development lacking porches. So— how the porch is used is not the only measure of its success.

The sooner we can get faith out of the design of our cities, the sooner we can implement sustainable solutions that have a positive effect on our living standards and help get our housing market (and our economy) back on track. And yes, I hope I’m dammed to a cul-de-sac for eternity!

Photo by Will Hart of College Hill, Rhode Island – Looking North-East with The First Baptist Church in America (1775), 75 North Main Street in the foreground.

Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.
January 5, 2011
Holiday Greetings from New Geography

Here’s to the end of our 31st month publishing NewGeography.com. It’s been another good year of steady growth. Thanks for reading, for the good natured arguments, and your submissions. We hope your holiday season is relaxing and safe (for me it’s a 350 mile drive across the frozen tundra.)

Here’s a look at of some of our most popular pieces over the past year.

January
The War Against Suburbia
Reducing Travel Congestion and Improving Travel Options in Los Angeles
Housing Affordability as Public Policy: The New Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey
Beyond Neo-Victorianism: A Call for Design Diversity

February
America on the Rise
A Race of Races

March
What American Demographics Will Look Like in 2050
Midwest Success Stories
New Traffic Scorecard Reinforces Density-Traffic Congestion Nexus
Let’s Not Fool Ourselves On Urban Growth

April
Best Cities Rankings
Finding Good in this Bad Time

May
Is it Game Over for Atlanta?
Bungled Parliament: The Price of Pursuing Safe Society Over Growth and Opportunity
Shanghai: The Rise of the Global City

June
The Future of America’s Working Class
Time to Dismantle the American Dream?
The Suburban Exodous, Are We There Yet?

July
How Texas Avoided the Great Recession
”James Drain” Hits Cleveland
Civic Choices: The Quality Vs. Quantity Dilemma

August
The Golden State’s War on Itself
The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction
Urban Legends, Why Suburbs Not Dense Cities are the Future
City Thinking is Stuck in the 90s
Can the Suburban Fringe be Downtown-Adjacent?

September
The New World Order
City Size Does Not Matter Much Anymore

October
The Smackdown of the Creative Class
Greetings from Recoveryland, Ten Places to Watch Coming out of the Great Recession
The World’s Fastest Growing Cities
The Privitization-Industrial Complex

November
I Opt Out of California
The Rise of the Efficient City
The Other Chambers of Commerce

December
Hasta La Vista, Failure
If California is so Great, Why are So Many Leaving?
Cities that Prosper, Cool or Not

Photo by Fusionpanda

December 25, 2010

Smart Growth and the Quality of Life

The idea of “smart growth” should be like mom and apple pie. But take a closer look and you find, for the most part, that smart growth policies often have unintended consequences that are anything but smart.

If housing is unaffordable, the cost of living is high and people are leaving, it probably means that a state rates higher in smart growth policies. That’s the story from an analysis of the new Smart Growth America state ratings on transportation policies the organization believes would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The new ratings are based upon strategies recommended in Moving Cooler, a smart growth oriented report authored by Cambridge Systematics in 2009 (Note 1).

The new Smart Growth America ratings and the Moving Cooler strategies relied, in large measure, on strategies that would force higher population densities, virtually stop development on and beyond the urban fringe, and seek to, in the immortal words of Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, “coerce” people out of cars.

Yet when the new ratings are arrayed alongside measures of the quality of life, such as housing affordability and the cost of living, smart growth shows its less attractive side. You can see this, for example, in patterns of domestic migration states with the highest Smart Growth America scores also suffer the highest net domestic out-migration. .

Quality of Life Indicators: The following analysis compares the Smart Growth America ratings of the states with quality of life indicators, which include lower house prices, a lower cost of living and a greater net domestic migration (Note 2).

Housing Affordability: Housing affordability is measured using a median value multiple (Note 3), which is the median house value by the median household income (from the 2009 American Community Survey). Economic research generally indicates that smart growth land use policies lead to higher house prices and lower levels of housing affordability. A lower housing affordability score means that housing is more affordable, and is an indication of a better quality of life. Generally, the median value multiple was 3.0 or below until the housing bubble and remains at that level in some states.
Cost of Living: The overall cost of living was examined using regional price parities developed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (US Department of Commerce) in the form of “regional price parities.” Regional price parities are the domestic equivalent of “purchasing power parities,” which are used to adjust personal income and gross domestic product data between nations. A lower score means that the cost of living is lower and is an indication of a better quality of life.
Net Domestic Migration: Net domestic migration rates are for the period of 2000 to 2009 and based upon Bureau of the Census data and is calculated as a percentage of the 2000 population. A higher score means that more people are moving in than moving out. A state with a higher score is more attractive to movers than states with lower scores, which is also an indication of a better quality of life.

The Top (Mostly Bottom) Ten

Generally, the states with the highest Smart Growth America ratings perform the worst by these quality of life indicators.

California is first in Smart Growth America score, at 82 (out of a possible 100). Yet, California ranks 49th in housing affordability, 48th in cost of living and 45th in net domestic migration, having lost 4.4 percent of its population (1.5 million) to other states since 2009. California’s average rank among the quality of life indicators is 47, essentially a mirror image of its Smart Growth America rating. Only New York has a worse average ranking (49th).

Maryland is second in Smart Growth America score, at 77. However, Maryland ranks 42nd in housing affordability, 41st in the cost of living and 36th in net domestic migration, having lost 1.8 percent of its residents (nearly 100,000) to other states since 2000. Maryland’s average rank is 40th on the quality of life indicators.

New Jersey ranks third, with a Smart Growth America score of 75. New Jersey ranks 45th in housing affordability, 47th in the cost of living and 47th in domestic migration, having lost 4.5 percent of its population (450,000) to other states during the decade. Among the top ten, only California has a worse average ranking than New Jersey’s, at 46th on the quality of life indicators.

Connecticut ranks fourth, with a Smart Growth America score of 70. Connecticut ranks 40th in housing affordability, 46th in cost of living and 40th in domestic migration, having lost 2.8 percent (nearly 100,000) of its population. Connecticut’s average rank is 42th in the quality of life indicators.

Washington is fifth in Smart Growth America score, at 68. Washington ranks 44th in housing affordability and 40th in cost of living. Washington ranked much higher, however, in domestic migration at 14th, with a gain of 4.0 percent (240,000). Washington, like other western states, has been the recipient of strong migration from even more expensive coastal California. Washington’s average rank is 33rd in the quality of life indicators.

Oregon ranks sixth, with a Smart Growth America score of 65. The state ranks 47th in housing affordability (trailing Hawaii, California and New York), but has a higher average cost of living ranking (31st) and in domestic migration, principally because it, like Washington is a favored destination by people fleeing California.

Seventh ranked Massachusetts (64) scores much more consistently in the quality of life indicators, at 46th in housing affordability, 45th in the cost of living, 44th in net domestic migration and 45th overall.

Neighboring Rhode Island (61) ranks eighth and is also a consistent performer, ranking 43rd in housing affordability and net domestic migration, 44th in the cost of living and 43rd overall.

Delaware and Minnesota share 9th place with a Smart Growth America score of 59. Delaware’s average ranking is 28th, and Minnesota’s average ranking is 29th. Delaware’s ranking, near the top of the bottom 25 is driven by a high net domestic migration rate. Minnesota scores similarly in all quality of life indicators.

Two states scoring the worst in the quality of life indicators were notably absent in the Top (Mostly Bottom) Ten. New York’s average rank was 49, compared to its Smart Growth America rank of 21. Hawaii’s average quality of life indicator rank was 46 and its Smart Growth America rank was 15. Some of the worst housing affordability and highest costs of living drove their low quality of life scores.

States with Higher Quality of life Indicators

The five states with the lowest Smart Growth America scores are Nebraska, North Dakota, West Virginia, Mississippi and Arkansas. These states surely qualify as “flyover” country, being well removed from the more elite coasts. Yet, each of these states scores considerably better than Smart Growth America’s top ten states, with some of the nation’s best housing affordability and lowest costs of living. Slightly more people moved out of these states than moved in. However, bottom ranked Arkansas (Smart Growth America score of 2) attracted 75,000 net domestic residents, almost 1.6 million more than Smart Growth America’s top ranked California and 170,000 more than second ranked Maryland.

Texas (15th), North Carolina (16th) and Georgia (17th) were among the higher scoring large states in the quality of life indicators. The high Texas ranking resulted from higher rankings in housing affordability and net domestic migration. Georgia and North Carolina had among the highest rankings in net domestic migration.

Statistical Analyses

For fun, I did a quick statistical analysis, which indicated that inferior housing affordability and a higher cost of living are associated with a higher Smart Growth America score, at a 99 percent level of confidence (Note 4).

This relationship is evident in Table 1, which is a summary by Smart Growth America scores. Housing affordability and the cost of living all improve as the Smart Growth America score declines. At this level, a similar relationship is evident in the net domestic migration rate, with the exception of states with a Smart Growth America score of under 20. The states with the highest Smart Growth America ratings (60 and over) lost 2.5 million domestic migrants, while the states with scores from 40 to 60 lost 500,000. States with Smart Growth America ratings under 40 gained 2.5 million domestic migrants, more people than live in all of the nation’s municipalities except for New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Table 2 provides detailed data for all states.

Table 1
Quality of Life Indicator Summary by Smart Growth Score

Smart Growth America Score	Housing Affordability	Cost of Living	Net Domestic Migration Rate	Net Domestic Migration
60 & Over	5.1	114.5	-1.7%	(2,035,132)
40 to 60	4.3	102.2	1.8%	(501,121)
20 to 40	3.3	87.7	2.2%	2,576,584
Under 20	2.6	79.2	-0.5%	(517)

Table 2
Smart Growth America Transportation Ratings & Quality of Life Indicator Summary by State

	Smart Growth America Rating		Quality of Life Indicators
State	Smart Growth America Rating		Housing Affordability		Cost of Living		Net Domestic Migration Rate		Average Rank
	Value	Rank	Value	Rank	Value	Rank	Value	Rank	Average Rank
California	82	1	6.5	49	129.1	48	-4.4%	45	47
Maryland	77	2	4.6	42	106.5	41	-1.8%	36	40
New Jersey	75	3	5.1	45	125.6	47	-5.4%	47	46
Connecticut	70	4	4.3	40	121.6	46	-2.8%	40	42
Washington	68	5	5.1	44	102.9	40	4.0%	14	33
Oregon	65	6	5.3	47	95.4	31	5.2%	9	29
Massachusetts	64	7	5.3	46	120.8	45	-4.3%	44	45
Rhode Island	61	8	4.9	43	113.7	44	-4.3%	43	43
Delaware	59	9	4.4	41	97.7	34	5.8%	8	28
Minnesota	59	9	3.6	26	92.6	28	-0.9%	32	29
Vermont	57	11	4.2	37	99.5	36	-0.2%	29	34
Illinois	53	12	3.7	28	99.2	35	-4.9%	46	36
Virginia	51	13	4.3	38	102.1	39	2.3%	19	32
Wisconsin	51	13	3.4	21	91.5	24	-0.2%	28	24
Hawaii	50	15	8.1	50	133.4	50	-2.4%	38	46
Pennsylvania	50	15	3.3	20	94.2	29	-0.3%	30	26
Arizona	45	17	3.9	30	94.4	30	13.5%	2	21
Florida	45	17	4.1	34	99.9	37	7.2%	6	26
Michigan	45	17	2.9	12	92.5	27	-5.4%	48	29
Nevada	42	20	3.9	32	100.4	38	17.9%	1	24
New York	41	21	5.6	48	131.8	49	-8.7%	50	49
New Mexico	37	22	3.7	27	83.5	14	1.4%	23	21
Colorado	36	23	4.3	39	97.1	32	4.7%	10	27
Utah	36	23	4.1	33	86.5	19	2.4%	18	23
Kentucky	35	25	2.9	13	80.8	4	2.0%	21	13
Tennessee	35	25	3.3	19	84.7	18	4.6%	12	16
Alaska	34	27	3.5	23	106.7	42	-1.2%	33	33
Maine	33	28	3.9	31	92.2	26	2.3%	20	26
South Carolina	33	28	3.2	18	83.2	13	7.6%	5	12
New Hampshire	32	30	4.1	35	113	43	2.6%	17	32
Georgia	31	31	3.4	22	87.9	23	6.7%	7	17
Kansas	31	31	2.6	7	83.6	16	-2.5%	39	21
Idaho	30	33	3.8	29	82.7	10	8.5%	3	14
Iowa	28	34	2.5	3	82.9	11	-1.7%	35	16
Ohio	28	34	3.0	15	87.2	21	-3.2%	42	26
Texas	27	36	2.6	6	91.7	25	4.0%	15	15
North Carolina	26	37	3.6	25	86.9	20	8.2%	4	16
Missouri	25	38	3.1	16	81.3	7	0.7%	27	17
Oklahoma	24	39	2.6	4	81.6	8	1.2%	24	12
Alabama	23	40	3.0	14	80.8	4	2.0%	22	13
Louisiana	23	40	3.2	17	83.6	16	-7.0%	49	27
Montana	23	40	4.2	36	83.1	12	4.4%	13	20
South Dakota	23	40	2.8	11	82.3	9	1.0%	26	15
Wyoming	21	44	3.5	24	97.4	33	4.6%	11	23
Indiana	20	45	2.7	9	83.5	14	-0.4%	31	18
Nebraska	18	46	2.6	5	87.3	22	-2.3%	37	21
North Dakota	18	46	2.4	1	79.5	3	-2.8%	41	15
West Virginia	13	48	2.5	2	70.3	1	1.0%	25	9
Mississippi	12	49	2.7	8	80.8	4	-1.3%	34	15
Arkansas	2	50	2.7	10	78.2	2	2.8%	16	9

Housing Affordability: Median House Value/Median Household Income, 2009
Cost of Living: Regional Price Parities, 2006
Net Domestic Migration: 2000-2009 Migration/2000 Population

——————-
Note 1: Moving Cooler has been criticized by Alan Pisarksi (ULI Moving Cooler Report: Exaggerations and Misconceptions) and this author (Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled Produces Meager Greenhouse Gas Emissions Returns) in previous newgeography.com articles.

Note 2: There are additional quality of life indicators, such as shorter work trip travel times, less intense traffic congestion, less intense air pollution, more living space, etc.

Note 3: This measure is based upon median house value, which is the only data available at the state level. The median value multiple is different from the Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income), which is widely used in metropolitan area analysis (such as in the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey).

Note 4: Details of the regression analysis: The dependent variable was the Smart Growth America score. The independent variables were the cost of living indicator and the domestic migration rate. The coefficient of determination (R2) was 0.55. (The positive relationship to the cost of living was strong, with a probability of only 1 in 10,000 that the result could have occurred by chance. The indicated association with the net migration rate was weak; the chance association cannot be ruled out).

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”

December 20, 2010

Don’t Touch My Junk – At the Airport OR at the Zoning Office

Until recently, “Don’t touch my junk” was only a rallying cry for people who liked to accumulate broken down cars in their yards, in defiance of local nuisance ordinances. The internet meme radiating from San Diego International Airport puts an entirely new spin on the phrase.

Americans have a strong tradition of equality, enshrined in the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution: “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. Next to the implied right to privacy—the right to be left alone—we value the fact that the law holds each of us as equals, whether we’re old or young, rich or poor, white, black, brown or purple. We’re Americans, darn it, and we should all be treated the same.

However, we balance the blind scales of justice with countervailing impulses of forgiveness and righteousness, charity and perseverance. The vaunted Puritan work ethic makes sense—you work hard, you should enjoy the fruits of your labor. On the other hand, our better nature implores us to give a helping hand up, to right wrongs and to make the world a better place. Sometimes we don’t treat people the same because they worked harder or because they need a little extra help. We balance our values, and that’s OK.

In the wake of 9/11, we have balanced many rights against the greater good of protecting our national security. This week’s dust-up with the TSA’s enhanced security systems is illustrative of that balancing act. Americans will put up with a lot when there is a genuine consensus that the end result benefits the greater good, but eventually government will overreach. Even on—or especially on—issues of grave national concern, we risk going a bridge too far.

Each day I work with communities and the people who live in them to build better places to live. Like an entrepreneur puts together a business plan evaluating assets and liabilities, revenues and expenses, communities put together comprehensive land use plans to chart their shared course forward. Those plans are implemented through local ordinances and policies, such as zoning regulations or economic development programs.

The 2005 US Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London (545 US 469) was a case of a bridge too far for local government policy. As you may recall, the city put together a redevelopment plan that promised over 3,000 new jobs and over $1 million a year in new tax revenue. The price to be paid was the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, which was slated to be acquired by eminent domain, demolished and rebuilt by private developers. In this case the Court upheld the existing balance between property rights and community development, ruling that the city’s acquisition of private property for economic development is a permissible “public use” under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, applied by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

This was a pyrrhic victory at best, as across the nation people rebelled at the notion, not just of takings—the property owners were due just compensation—but of imposing so great a cost on an individual for the dubious betterment of so many. If they could do this to Susette Kelo in New London, Connecticut, they could take any of our homes if a big enough carrot comes to town. As Ilya Shapiro at Cato Institute noted this summer, in the five years since the Supreme Court decision nine state high courts have limited eminent domain, and almost all state legislatures across the country have passed some type of property rights reform. The consensus comes undone when we reach too far.

Now I am a planner, by training and craft. I don’t believe, as some say, that “central planning is superior to free-market competition.” Comprehensive planning is a statement of a community’s shared goals and visions for the future. As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” The federal government sinks billions of dollars into roads, rail and air networks, so it makes sense to do some transportation planning. Local governments sink untold millions into water, sewer, and road infrastructure, so it makes some sense to spend those scare funds prudently. That said, there is no sense in robbing Peter to pay Paul. Peter needs to pay for Peter’s problems and Paul needs to pay for Paul’s.

The same questions arise countless times in local government. We write a rule to fix a problem and then the rule creates another problem. For example, local zoning regulations often require special conditional use permits for places of worship. Traditionally churches, synagogues and mosques have been sited in residential neighborhoods, limiting the traffic increase to once-a-week worship services. As a practical matter it wasn’t much of a problem. More recently, many of these buildings have added day care and other week-day services more typical of commercial land uses. So should they be treated the same as commercial uses that attract traffic and impact residential livability? Or following the First Amendment should freedom of religion exempt places of worship from local land use requirements?

Congress stepped in to this zoning question with the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000, prohibiting any “substantial burden” on religious exercise unless a “compelling government interest” can be demonstrated. Religious expression is a constitutionally protected freedom,yet there may be compelling public interest in balancing that expression. In the case of airport security, we all recognize the public interest in security, yet part of the current public outcry stems from the perception that the government may not be consistent in how they treat people based on their religious practices.

We are still struggling to interpret RLUIPA in cities and counties across the country as well as in our courts. Boulder County, Colorado, recently appealed to the US Supreme Court a decision holding that the county had not treated a proposed church campus expansion similarly to a non-religious use on equal terms. The County’s long-standing commitment to “curbing urban sprawl, maintaining open space to preserve the county’s rural character, and sustaining agriculture”, as expressed in the Comprehensive Plan and implemented in the Land Use Code, was insufficient to balance the protected religious expression. However that case turns out one thing is clear: we have to treat everyone the same, be they a Christian cathedral, a Buddhist temple or a non-denominational retreat center.

Whether it’s the political correctness of security pat-downs or land use regulations, we inevitably get in trouble when we forget the great American traditions of equality, charity and justice. All men are created equal, at the airport or at the zoning office.

John C. Shepard, AICP, works in regional development in Southwest Minnesota and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. John has experience in local economic and community development across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. He blogs on life, liberty and the pursuit of Americana at jcshepard.com.

Photo by phidauex, Sam Ley

December 18, 2010