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Smart Growth Burns Thousands of Homes

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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Los Angeles city and regional planners are just as responsible for the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires that have burned in the past few days as if they had poured gasoline on the homes and lit the matches. The destruction of these homes, including, for what it is worth, homes owned by Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, and Paris Hilton, among other celebrities, is a direct result of so-called “smart-growth” policies that call for establishing greenbelts around cities and packing people in high-density housing within those cities.

Pacific Palisades is on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, most of which have been locked up from development in various regional parks, including 72,000 acres protected by the Santa Monica Conservancy, 157,700 acres in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, and various smaller parks. These have severely limited the amount of land available for housing and other developments, driving up housing prices. Continue reading →

Transportation Subsidies in 2022

By | | Transportation
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Public transportation received $69 billion in subsidies in 2022, compared with $90 billion in subsidies to highways and $20 billion to airlines, according to data released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics last week. These data include all government revenues and expenditures on these modes of travel, with the revenues broken out by “user-based” and non-user-based (meaning taxes or deficit spending).

Government Revenues and Expenses by Mode
(millions of dollars except passenger-miles in millions and Subsidies/PM in dollars)

ModeRevenueExpenditureNetPassenger-MilesSubsidy/PM
Transit11,18880,527-69,33830,082$2.300
Highways161,299251,777-90,4784,708,2700.019
Air37,66358,348-20,685992,2010.021
Amtrak2,5065,975-3,4704,8860.710

While these results are two years old, it takes awhile for data from many different sources to percolate through Department of Transportation channels. Since those sources include all state and local governments, collecting and verifying the data can be time consuming. Continue reading →

No, Blackrock Doesn’t Own 1/3 of U.S. Housing

By | | Housing
11 Comments

Matthew Yglesias recently tweeted,

That’s a nice hypothesis, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As noted in this article, “Who Owns the U.S. Housing Market,” some 68 percent of the 146 million homes in the U.S. are single-family homes, and less than 4 percent of single-family homes are owned by “institutional investors” who own at least 100 homes. Those same investors own about 40 percent of multifamily housing. That means all institutional investors combined, of which Blackrock is only one, own about 20 million homes, or about 14 percent of housing. Continue reading →

Housing First Fails

By | | Housing
4 Comments

The number of homeless people in the United States has grown by 33 percent since 2020, according to a report released last month by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A chart on page 2 of the report (shown below) indicates that the number of homeless people was gradually shrinking between 2007 (when the annual homeless census began) and 2016, but then started rapidly growing in 2019 and even more rapidly growing in 2022.

Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of the report from which this chart was taken.

In the 1980s, groups and agencies worried about homelessness began programs aimed at treating drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and other conditions that led people to become homeless. More recently, low-income housing groups have advocating increasing spending on housing subsidies to provide shelter for homeless people. These two alternatives are known as “Treatment First” and “Housing First.” Continue reading →

Happy New Year

By | | News commentary
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Last year was quite possibly the most politically tumultuous since at least 1884, when one presidential candidate was widely believed to have accepted bribes and the other was accused of rape. It seems predictable that, between DOGE, tariffs, immigration disputes, and international strife, 2025 will be even more politically fractious. Whether that’s a good thing may depend on your political persuasion.

Grizzly steps gingerly into the New Year.

Last year ended with the death of Jimmy Carter, who has often been described as a failed president but a great ex-president. Yet for the last few days we’ve been treated to a debate about just how bad a president he was and whether his post-presidency was all that was claimed. Continue reading →

Transit Executives Rake in the Dough

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

The news from California this week is that Michael Hursh, the CEO of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit), is resigning, but the agency will continue to pay him through September as a “senior advisor.” The real news is how much he was paid: according to Transparent California, in 2022 he collected $556,045.

Former AC Transit CEO Michael Hursh and current AC Transit board member Sarah Syed. Photos by AC Transit.

Transit agencies have historically paid their executives well, but $556,000 seems like a lot even for these agencies. So I decided to do a quick survey of transit agency executive pay. First, Hursh’s resignation is worth examining in a little more detail. Continue reading →

Selling BLM Lands Won’t Make Homes Affordable

By | | Housing, Public lands
6 Comments

Economist Thomas Sowell, who I respect a great deal, has gotten sucked into the stampede to sell public lands in order to simultaneously reduce the debt and make housing more affordable. Advocates of this view are ignoring clear indications that selling these lands will not accomplish either goal.

BLM lands: far from food, water, and jobs.

One advocate for this point of view, William Perry Pendley, defensively argues that he is not proposing to sell wilderness areas, national parks, or even national forests, but mainly just Bureau of Land Management lands. The problem with this is that most BLM lands are lands leftover after homesteaders, ranchers, timber companies, and others picked the most valuable federal lands for themselves, thus earning BLM lands the title, “the lands no one wanted.” Continue reading →

St. Louis Gates Its Light-Rail Stations

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Light rail suffers the highest crime rates of any mode of transit and this is largely due to the honor system of fare payment. St. Louis Metro is addressing this by adding gates to its light-rail stations. Unlike most cities, St. Louis can do this because its light-rail system is entirely separated from streets and sidewalks.

Gates have been installed in four of the region’s 38 light-rail stations, but Metro hasn’t yet installed fare systems. Until it does, it has security officers standing at each gate to check that customers have paid their fares before they are allowed to go on the platform. Metro expects to have gates at all 38 stations installed by January 2026, but hasn’t said how soon it will have fare payment systems installed. Continue reading →

Happy Holidays

By | | Housekeeping
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Best wishes for the holiday season and the coming New Year from the Antiplanner and the Antiplanning dog, Grizzly.

Grizzly and Mount Jefferson

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, the Yule Solstice, Kwanzaa, or are just enjoying a few days off with your family, we hope you have a safe and enjoyable holiday and a productive New Year.

The Scandal of the Public Non-Profit

By | | News commentary
2 Comments

This is the time of year when we think charitable thoughts about those less fortunate than ourselves and, if we can afford it, give to charities to help such people. But there are some charities that are hardly charitable.

Excerpt from IRS form 990 submitted by Mercy Housing showing amounts paid to its top staff members. Click image for a larger view.

In order to qualify for tax-deductible donations, non-profits must persuade the Internal Revenue Service that they are a charitable organization. Such organizations, says the IRS, are “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, or other specified purposes.” Continue reading →