ADC Blog

All elected and appointed officials in Maryland are supposed to march in lock-step with Governor O’Malley’s coercive statewide growth management plan known as PlanMaryland.

If dissent is expressed, over-the-top measures will be taken to de-legitimize it.  Back in October 2011, I participated with several other speakers at a public forum organized by Carroll County Commissioner Richard Rothschild.  “PlanMaryland: At the Crossroads” identified technical errors and faulty assumptions that undermine the plan’s viability.  It was widely publicized and about 150 people were in attendance from members of the Governor’s cabinet to state senators to county commissioners to local activists.  Additionally, the media was present and provided lots of coverage, even live-blogging the event.  All the presentations were posted on the County website (available here).  A nominal fee was proposed to cover costs, but only about 1/4 of the participants paid it proving that the fee was not an impediment to attendance.

There was no call to order, no motion set before the board, no votes taken, no direction given to staff.  In other words, there was nothing at this forum that in any way could be confused with a meeting of an elected body set to take action.

But the hypersensitive environmentalist community was offended that a forum would be organized that challenged their precious assumptions, so they sought a ruling from the Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board who has issued an absurd ruling that the event was a “closed meeting,” thus violating the state’s open meetings law.  The Carroll County Board of Commissioners has posted a response on its website showing that there is at least some common sense left in Maryland.

Homeownership rates fall to 66% as downturn nears a bottom.  Bad news, indeed … and more evidence that the housing market is critical to restoring prosperity to the American economy.

In Bloomberg, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser uses an index that measures racial isolation and neighborhood dissimilarity to comment on the progress of integration (or, the declining state of segregation) in American cities.

“As the figure shows, as of 1970, almost 80 percent of either whites or blacks would have had to move neighborhoods in order to achieve an even distribution of whites and blacks within the average metropolitan area. By 1990, that dissimilarity measure had dropped to 66 percent; it is 54 percent today. We are very far from living in a perfectly integrated society, but our nation is far more integrated than it was 40 years ago.”

The article includes a graph that illustrates this movement.

Over at Reason, Tim Cavanaugh asks a question that should be posed much, much more: How many public transit expert/advocates actually ride on public transportation?

Cavanaugh makes a good observation about the transportation planners who, lacking the experience of being an actual transit rider, plan the routes they expect us to take: “There’s one thing you learn by your second day of using transit when you actually don’t have a choice: For every transfer in your itinerary, you need to double the time allotted for the trip.”

And there’s the rub.  In the vast majority of metropolitan areas, the transit route takes significantly longer … now matter how congested the roads get.  Which is why the only way transit works is if the alternative (driving) is worse.

Technology Review discusses a new technology being developed known as V2V in the automotive industry.  Basically, vehicle-to-vehicle tech is the use of wireless technology so that car computers can know distances and velocity and collision risk of other cars.  This, combined with other technologies such as adaptive cruise control, are moving the industry that much closer to driverless cars.

And on the subject of driverless cars, or self-driving cars, there’s no blog better at keeping us up-to-date than the Antiplanner who has been talking about driverless cars for a long time.

Every year Wendell Cox of Demographia (United States) and Hugh Pavletich of Peformance Urban Planning (New Zealand) publish their International Housing Affordability Survey (IHAS).  This year’s survey is the eighth edition.

The IHAS includes a wealth of graphs and charts all structured to explain and illuminate the impact of land use policy on housing and homeownership.  This year’s survey is introduced Robert Bruegmann and he succinctly explains why this matters: “Nothing in the world today affects citizens more directly than the home in which they live.”

Bruegmann, who wrote the concise and critical book Sprawl: A Compact History, goes on to identify the tension surrounding housing policy.

“At one end of the political spectrum have been societies in which land is owned in common and is supposed to be allocated to individuals and families on the basis of merit or need.  Such has been the case with many Utopian and Socialist societies.  At the other end of the spectrum have been societies where individual ownership of land and homes is considered a bedrock condition of a democratic society, where ownership is widely dispersed, and individual rights and preferences have been zealously safeguarded from all but the most necessary intervention.”

Of course, housing policy is not at the extremes but somewhere within that continuum.  However, the International Housing Affordability Survey convincingly shows that the closer policy moves toward the Utopian/Socialist ideal, the less affordable housing becomes for people.  Smart Growth planning policies move the needle toward the Utopian/Socialist end while a less regulated housing market is championed by people who believe in property rights and individual freedom.

As Bruegmann concludes, “Whether [Smart Growth] policies were intended to enhance the environment or limit sprawl, they clearly had an effect on the price of housing,” adding that “land use policies in places like coastal California, Vancouver, Britain and Australia, have dramatically driven up the cost of housing, and that the less intrusive policies of places like Atlanta and Houston has kept prices down.”

I hope we’re entering a No Excuses era when local policymakers can no longer get away with claiming they simply had no idea that restrictive land use regulations artificially increase housing costs to the point that low and middle income Americans are priced out of homeownership.

At New Geography, Rob Sentz has an article that ranks the states by competitiveness.   If you follow the Smart Growth movement much, you’re familiar with the usual suspects – that is, the states that have enacted strong growth management laws.

States like California, Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota and Oregon have created fewer jobs than expected whereas market-oriented states like Texas, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas have created more jobs than expected.

This is good news.

Travel & Leisure magazine is out with its annual survey of American cities, and one of the categories is “rudeness.”  So what do the rudest cities have in common?  They have some of the highest population densities (people per square mile) in the United States.  Here’s the Top Five:

1. New York     27,012 people per square mile
2. Miami           11,135 people per square mile
3. Washington, D.C.    9,856 people per square mile
4. Los Angeles          8,092 people per square mile
5. Boston          12,792 people per square mile

Of course, the Smart Growth planning doctrine thinks density levels like these lead to vibrant urbanism, and the Sierra Club classifies a mere 15,500 people per square mile as “suburban efficient.” (To be “urban efficient,” the Sierra Club recommends density at 155,000 people per square mile.)

Many communities adopting future land use plans are signing off on densities projected at or near levels of 10,000+ people per square mile.  For example, Maryland’s top-down, statewide growth management mandate known as PlanMaryland calls for high densities of 16,704 people per square mile, and my own Alachua County wants to cram 19,622 people per square mile for future developments.  But planning officials are never candid about these numbers, instead framing density issues in terms of dwelling units per acre to disguise the crowding that people will invariably reject.

Very, very few people actually want these high density levels (and most who do already live in high density cities).  In addition to crowded cities being rude cities, they also are gaining a reputation for being miserable places.

Hmm, cramming bunches of people together creates a less-than-genteel environment.  Who knew?

Faster, please.