Shortages and Abundance | The Antiplanner . . . all wish to kill hundreds of millions to billions of humans. These are malignant beliefs. I saw a very enjoyable travelogue show just the other day. While the episodes are a bit uneven, but Billy Connolly is fun, plus, it frames the US as it really is, a vast huge expanse with few people. So, why exactly are we forcing people to live on little slivers of land, where home prices are astronomical? Repeat after me, "progressives hate humans!"
Comments
The Sun Belt Is Rising Again, New Census Numbers Show | Newgeography.com
. . . and the cities, which were vaccinated by the 2008 Great Recession, are once again zombies, shambling towards their demise. Suburbs, exurbs, and rural living, however, is back on track to become the primary American living arrangement. Good! We have returned to the pre 2009-2011 aberration where it looked like Americans might be moving back to the city. So, how big a trend is this? "These trends predate the recession. Since 2000, the biggest migration winners in percentage terms are Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Orlando. In total numbers since 2000 it’s also a familiar list, led by places like Phoenix (net gain: 705,000), Dallas-Ft. Worth (569,000), Atlanta (547,000), Riverside-San Bernardino (513,000) and Houston (496,000). The biggest losers are also familiar, led by the New York metropolitan area, which has lost 2.65 million net migrants since 2000, followed by Los Angeles (negative 1.65 million) and Chicago (down 880,000). Remarkably the two metro areas that have benefited the most from the digitization of the economy are in the loser’s column; between them San Jose and San Francisco lost over 550,000 domestic migrants since 2000." Big! The old line progressive blue model cities are losing population to the new, and much more dynamic sunbelt cities. "The other big finding from the new estimates: suburbs are back. In the wake of the housing bust it was widely predicted that the ‘burbs were doomed by high gas prices, millennial preferences and a profound shift of employment to the core cities. The New York Times NYT -0.08% evenpublished fantasies on how the suburban carcass could be carved up, envisioning suburban three-car garages “subdivided into rental units with street front cafés, shops and other local businesses” while abandoned pools would become skateboard parks. As economist Jed Kolko has noted, the much celebrated era when core cities grew faster than suburbs — the immediate 2009-2011 aftermath of the recession — turned out to be remarkably short-lived. From July 2014-July 2015, only seven out of 53 core cities added more domestic migrants than their suburbs. Of these, the District of Columbia (Washington) could be considered high density urban; the other five core counties are functionally more suburban than urban (Phoenix, Raleigh, Richmond, Sacramento and San Antonio). Overall domestic migration continues from the core cities to the suburbs. Over the last year core counties lost a net 185,000 domestic migrants, while the suburban counties gained 187,000." If other people are hell, then the city is hell on steroids. "These trends are likely to continue as long as the economy achieves even modest growth. One big factor will be the migration of millennials, now headed increasingly to Sun Belt cities and suburbs. Since 2010, among educated millennials, the fastest growth in migration has been to such lower-cost regions as Atlanta, Orlando, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and even Cleveland. This is largely a product of high housing prices. According to Zillow, rents claim upward of 45% of income in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami compared to less than 30% of income in places like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. The costs of purchasing a house are even more lopsided: in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, a monthly mortgage takes, on average, close to 40% of income, compared to 15% nationally. Millennials are also headed increasingly to the suburbs. According to the National Association of Realtors, 80% of the homes purchased by millennials between 2013 and 2014 were detached houses, and 8% had chosen attached housing. This trend will accelerate in the next few years, suggests Kolko, as the peak of the millennial wave turns 30." Apparently the indoctrination of the Millennial in K-12 and college has not held as well as anticipated. They seem to be able to make rational economic decisions once it is their money, and not the money of their parents, or others. Expect this awakening to continue as Millennials turn to work, and begin families. These trials will result in many of the Millennials being slowly be washed of their inane love for all things socialist. Remember the older Millennials are just now turning 30. Kotkin concludes, "America’s geography will be increasingly dominated by Sun Belt cities as well as suburbs. This challenges the preferred narrative among most planners and the mainstream media, as well as some developers who believe more Americans desire to live in high cost, high density locales. Some day perhaps the facts — as seen both in this year’s numbers and longer term trends — will intrude on the narrative. Dispersion is back, and getting stronger. It’s time that developers, planners and the media adjust to the facts, rather than just reflect their prejudices." Planners will not change. Portlandia is proof that the planner will continue to believe what amounts to religious beliefs regardless of the depth of the facts arrayed against him. These are intelligent people who are sufficiently clever to trap themselves in a belief net which is impervious to reality. California Cruises Towards $15 Hr Minimum Wage: Expect Budget Deficits, Higher Taxes, Job Losses | MishTalk
. . . so let's get this thing collapsing. "California governor Jerry Brown has proposed a $15 minimum wage by 2022. If the legislation passes, it will wreak havoc on city budgets, state budgets, businesses, and jobs." But, since it does not appear we will find a way out outside of the collapse, we might as well get there quickly. Time to go full socialism/progressivism, full $15 per hour minimum wage, and all the rest of the trimmings, and perks. Then be ready to sort out the disaster once the collapse happens. Ok, so I am not quite ready to actually embrace this mindset, but I do think it will be the most likely mechanism of escape for states like New York, Rhode Island, Illinois, California, Oregon, and other fully invested blue states. California is a strange state with massive wealth clotted a few miles from the coast around the SF bay area, LA, and San Diego. The interior of the state is quickly becoming a welfare state, filled with the destitute, and desperate. Because the blighted areas are far from the wealthy enclave, it is easy to simply overlook them. But even overlooked, they grow. But to keep this insane system afloat, the state must extract more taxes, and while the wealthy can afford these, and even wonder why anyone would complain, the middle class is squeezed, and increasingly leave. Those who remain need assistance to survive. In Facebook’s Hometown, the First Responders Aren’t Local Of course, they are not local, the cost of housing in the wealthy enclave is too high for the middle class who do not already have homes. "The department’s challenge reflects a flip side of the tech boom: Facebook, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and other companies have brought thousands of high-paying jobs to Silicon Valley, but that has driven housing costs sharply higher, pushing firefighters, teachers, nurses and other middle-class workers to live far from their jobs. The trend creates difficulties, including worsening traffic and the risk that emergency workers won’t be able to get there in the case of a natural disaster." Yes, the demand part of the housing problem is driven by tech companies bringing in new workers. But the other part is that the government will not allow any significant amount of land be utilized for new housing. If they would Free up 400,000 square acres of land, this would immediately change the cost problem. "The public-sector workers leaving the Bay Area aren’t alone. Americans are moving away from the tech hub faster than they are arriving, according to a report published last month by the Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project. Other expensive regions are trying to maintain workers nearby. The Fire Department of New York awards job applicants who are residents of the city and nearby counties extra points on the firefighter exam, giving preference to them over applicants who live farther away. The problem usually comes down to housing. South of Menlo Park, in Cupertino, where Apple Inc. is based, school-district officials in December said they plan to build more than 200 affordable apartments for teachers. Menlo Park fire district workers will earn an average $147,000 this year, Mr. Schapelhouman said. But that money doesn’t go far in a region where the median home value is $2 million, up 18% in the past year, according to real-estate website Zillow Group Inc. Home prices have risen dramatically since Facebook moved to Menlo Park five years ago." This shows the insanity of the problem. More people move out of the area than into the area, yet housing prices still spike. This is because the tech companies are able to pay huge salaries, and the housing supply is incredibly limited. This means that the older middle class people are being bought out of their homes by new tech employees with huge salaries, while the remaining middle class cannot afford to buy houses in the region. This means the limited apartment rentals are sky-high as well. In the end, people live far from their work. The existing homeowners will never let the local, or state government change this situation. The results would be average home prices falling from $2 million to well less than one half of that amount. That is a real loss of money, and the homeowners will not stand for that change. Walther Russell Mead wrote an article a few years ago which describes this problem well. http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/03/06/blue-civil-war-the-battle-for-california/ He ends with the following: "But there’s a serious political opportunity in America for a movement that cares deeply about ensuring that the people who need public services (whether provided directly by the state as in public schools or indirectly through vouchers and charter schools) receive good value for their money. A movement that fights to reform government and make it work, to strip away unnecessary frills and patronage posts, to disempower bureaucracies and return control to citizens and to create a regulatory and legal framework that can bring start ups and jobs into inner cities could change the balance of power in American politics. We wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the young people who’ve gone into programs like Teach For America, or been active in movements like the effort to rebuild New Orleans begin to think outside the blue box about what kind of agenda America’s troubled cities really need. When and if that happens, the politics of the both century will finally begin to shut down, and the politics of a new and more hopeful era in American life will get under way." I agree with this assessment completely. However, I am increasingly less persuaded by the idea that the change will somehow come from the young, the Millennials. While they as a cohort are larger than the Boomers, the Boomers have indoctrinated them with what seems to be a terminal belief that 20th century progressivism is the End of History. It is not even a good idea. I am increasingly concerned that we will actually have to wait for the blue model to fully seize before the change will become possible. And even then, we will likely see partial implementation, and attempts to retain the very worst aspects of the 20th century blue economic model. The educational system has been in collapse since the 1960s, yet we continue to drag it along as if it is the best thing available. The only inroads to change occurs in the deep blue states, or states where serious catastrophe's have occurred. The two which come to mind are New York City, and New Orleans. Both have majority or close to majority charter schools, and both have seen much improved educational outcomes from these school. They also both still see strong pushback against these superior schools. The Boomers are not willing to let their childish dreams of control die so something better can replace them. Worst generation ever. Gov John Bel Edwards proposes curbs on Louisiana vouchers, charter schools NY rejects all applications for new charter schools The charter school tide is turning, and de Blasio may be left behind Why it seems impossible to buy your first home
. . . housing prices in most of the areas discussed are high due to growth boundaries, services boundaries, and/or zoning restrictions. San Francisco bay area has a huge amount of land, 4.5 million square acres in total, and all of the development is only on about 0.8 million square acres. But nearly all of the rest of the land is off limits for development. There is apparently between 300-500 thousand square acres which could be developed but which lunatics are attempting to make into land permanently unavailable for development. The reason San Francisco's property values are insanely high, is lack of land to build more housing, and this is purely a man made catastrophe. Releasing 400,000 acres of land for development would quickly return the San Francisco housing market to rational pricing, but it would also cause the interstellar individual house prices to fall, likely by half or more, and then remain low. And existing homeowners would be apoplectic with that outcome. Once a growth, or service boundary, or zoning scheme begins to artificially inflate prices, it becomes nearly impossible to reduce the underlying cause of the problem. The existing homeowners want high home prices more than they are interested in housing affordability for others. They make silly arguments about how land must remain off limits for development, promote infill development, and seek to spend all transportation dollars on transit, and not on roadways. This drives congestion through the roof, and causes large increases in costs to the individuals, pollution, and carbon. This is what is commonly defined as "sprawl," it is the natural outcome of "Smart Growth" and "Urban Planning." How Badger missed this 900 lb gorilla in the living room is beyond me. These prices are seldom natural, and when they are they are nearly always driven by a natural limit on available land which looks like a growth boundary. These artificial prices will only remain as long as people find reason to live in the area, once that stops, and the people begin leaving, housing prices will decline. Commonly this is pooh poohed, but that is exactly how Detroit went from America's fourth largest, and most prosperous city to the burned out hulk of a city it is today. It underwent this change between 1970, and the present, a mere 45 years. Trouble In Smart Growth's Nirvana
"Recent developments in Portland and Oregon suggest that smart growth is having only a modest effect, while driving down housing affordability, increasing traffic congestion and losing popularity in neighborhoods." Hold on! Smart Growth is supposed to make housing affordable, not unaffordable, and all those billion dollar light rail projects are supposed to decrease traffic congestion. It's almost like it's some sort of bait and switch scheme. Hold on . . . Maddogswif is speaking to me sotto vocce . . . She says it is a bait and switch scheme. Mon Dieu! Who would have guessed? Government lying to the taxpayers, what's the world coming to? Answer: Expensive bullshit, that's what the world is coming to. "Despite the claims of the transit-media complex, Portland’s anti-highway policies are failing. The 2000 Census shows that transit’s work trip market share remains 20 percent below the 1980 Census rate, which preceded opening of the first light rail line. And, Portland’s highway congestion has become the worst of any metropolitan area of its size." Great, we are in reverse and accelerating! "The most destructive result has been Portland’s “green-lining” of housing opportunity by the urban growth boundary. According to the National Association of Homebuilders, Portland’s housing affordability declined at a far greater rate in the last decade than in any other major metropolitan area. At the same time, housing affordability improved in faster growing areas, such as Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Raleigh-Durham." The verdict is in, Urban Planners are imbeciles. The whole Smart Growth thing is nothing but one of those Gorian secular religions, similar to the great gorical's Gaiastic Apocalyptic Global Warming religion. And Smart Growth comes with the same outcomes, the opposite of the prophecies. This is like a 3rd rate SciFi POC (piece of crap). Luckily, I live mid stream of the River Effluent, er, Portlandia, or ground zero as it is known by those remaining rational in the area. So Where Should People Live in the Future? Probably exactly where they want to live, because from what I can see, that's where they end up living. Sorry, time for a detour . . . "What was perhaps most intriguing was that the top ranked city for unhappiness is Portland, Oregon, the city that many planners hold up as Nirvana." Well, only for the Smart Growth Urban Planners, and people who believe the press tongue bathings, er, news. For us who live here, especially those of us who have lived here for a long time (1972 for me), this is OBVIOUS, TANGIBLE, AND PALPABLE. Loud enough? Terrible traffic, unaffordable housing, idiotic transit which mangles everything from roadways, to bicycle riders. Will Portland Streetcar ever find a way to prevent bike-rail crashes? - BikePortland.org "Twelve years after Portland Streetcar added its rails to city streets, it’s still a Portland rite of passage to crash your bike on its tracks — and it’s still a maddening problem for the handful of people trying to solve it. “'I just can’t believe that in a place like Amsterdam or any number of European cities where they have had girder rail — I can’t believe that somebody hasn’t figured this out,' Portland Streetcar consultant Carter MacNichol said in an interview Wednesday. 'But apparently they haven’t.'" Said the Portland Streetcar Consultant, excuse me, idiot. The Antiplanner is not as uninformed as this idiot Portland Streetcar Consultant, there is a fix: "There’s one good thing about the streetcar, at least if you are a Portland auto driver annoyed by the city’s aggressive cyclists. More than two-thirds of Portland cyclists surveyed in 2008 said they’ve crashed on the streetcar tracks. There’s an engineering fix–putting rubber flaps on the rails that are flexible enough for the streetcars to push out of the way but too stiff for bicycles to sink into. But Portland Streetcar doesn’t want to install them because it’s too expensive and they’d have to replace them every two or three years." Why is government so willing to hire know-nothing consultants, when a bit of perusing around the Internet would answer most of their questions? Yeah I know, they hire them because the politician want a cushy job once they fail out of "public service" and nothing is as cushy as a job which requires not one whit of knowledge, like Portland Streetcar Consultant! It's the old I'll scratch your back two step. The cure is simple, get rid of the streetcar, and light rail. I can already hear the shrieks from the transit Mafia. But as the Antiplanner observes, "[c]onsidering that the 2013 American Community Survey found that more than 18,000 workers living in the city of Portland bicycle to work while only 7,800 take some form of rail transit–including both streetcars and light rail–it seems like the city has its priorities exactly backwards. I hope officials from other cities who look to Portland as a model for transportation planning take the time to read these audits." So, rail transit in Portlandia, which carries about one half of all transit riders, only takes 7,800 workers each day? Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ! We spent billions on this crap, and it carries less than 8,000 people to work? Taxis would have been cheaper, and with those impossibly low ridership numbers the roadways wouldn't notice the increased carriage. Sorry for the detour, back to the question of where people want to live. Portlandia's Smart Growth Urban Planners know exactly where people want to live, in the city, in a high density environment. You know like rats in a packed maze. This was confirmed by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project's national survey assessing where people would like to live: "A new national survey by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project finds that nearly half (46%) of the public would rather live in a different type of community from the one they're living in now- a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers. When asked about specific metropolitan areas where they would like to live, respondents rank Denver, San Diego and Seattle at the top of a list of 30 cities, and Detroit, Cleveland and Cincinnati at the bottom. Other survey findings include: • Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area. • By a ratio of more than three-to-one, Americans prefer living where the pace of life is slow, not fast. A similarly lopsided majority prefer a place where neighbors know each other well to one where neighbors don't generally know each other's business." Ok, so the Portlandia Smart Growth Urban Planners lied, through their teeth. People want to live in lower density, with a slower pace, and where neighbors know each other. That pretty much redlines cities, where no one knows, or cares about the neighbors. Ironically, we have had a number of friends who became enamored with the Pearl District a trendy urban neighborhood in Portlandia. The ones who moved to the Pearl all followed the same pattern, point by point, it was like a comedy bit their behavior was so predictable. They would first become enamored, then they would watch the Pearl's housing prices, and notice the housing prices were going up, up, up. So, they would buy in, and instantly become wildly excited about The Pearl. They would throw 6 or more parties the first year, where before they might have thrown a single holiday party. The second year they would remain enthusiastic, but the parties would fall to perhaps three. The third year they might throw a holiday party, but no more. The fourth year we would meet them at someone elses party, and they would have moved back to the suburbs. They weren't talking about the Pearl. It was a comedy bit! Some did well with home prices, especially the early adopters, but the latecomers, I suspect got burned. While I asked softly about why, I could only get something along the lines of, "we missed our neighbors in [the suburbs]." Well, yes, and all the concrete, and hard surfaces of the city would get old, as would being trapped with only one car. Plus, we would only go to one party per couple, per year. Parking was a bitch, and I was not about to prostrate myself on the altar of Smart Growth. I suspect they found that with time fewer, and fewer people would trek down to parking hell to visit, which meant they were always doing the driving. If hell is other people, the city is surely hell. Leave it for the young to populate, and with experience, realize they don't like the city as much as they thought they would. Remember, Portlandia is a cautionary tale. |
AuthorMaddog Categories
All
|