Category: Lincoln Institute

Why high-speed rail debate’s a disaster, how to fix it

Bruce Babbitt, the former Interior Secretary (1993-2001) and Arizona governor 1978-87, thinks the national debate over President Obama’s push for high-speed rail “has, to put it mildly, been a total disaster.”

In terms of marketing, he told a group of journalists today, Obama goofed in comparing a new national high-speed rail initiative to the intercontinental railroad in the 19th century. That infrastructure initiative, Babbitt noted, is inextricably linked in history books with a huge corruption scandal, the Credit Mobilier. A much better comparison, Babbitt said, would have been the interstate highway system.

Today many people look back on the interstate highway-building project as if it was a unanimous hug-fest. In fact, Babbitt said, many governors opposed it when it was first proposed. They rejected the idea of a federal tax. Major businesses such as the concrete and steel industries didn’t like the federalization. Eventually, though, after “protracted discussion,” agreement was forged to raise the gas tax and create a trust fund – the product of “a lot of good, solid brokering.”

Why not, he proposes, bring something of that process to a high-speed rail venture in the only region that, today, has a sound network of passenger rail – the Northeast? What about a regional compact for a regional gas (or other) tax, for regional high-speed rail? It might be a model for other regions. (Or not, as he pointed out.)

But he was also a bit pessimistic that seven regional governors could get together even on this kind of project. Someone asked why. “I was a governor,” he replied.

The conference sponsors are the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Nieman Foundation, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Housing: Will we escape a second dip?

Blogging from “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Wellesley economist Chip Case, who studies housing bubbles (and who founded the Case-Shiller real estate report) says this downtown is odd because typically a housing oversupply means production slows, and the supply gets soaked up as new households form. But new household formation is lagging – it’s going away almost as fast as production is going away. Rental vacancies are up to 11%. This is odd. If people are getting kicked out of their houses (foreclosures, etc.) you’d think they’d be turning to rental housing. But they aren’t. (I’ll get to the why in a minute but it partly involves immigration.)

So the lack of household formation is disrupting the traditional pattern of how a downturn turns around. His verdict: “Jobs have to start coming back.”

There are positive omens: New housing starts are up. The existing inventory is down – a year ago the estimate was the housing inventory was an 11.5-month supply and now it’s 6.7 months. Sales of existing housing (which he thinks is a better gauge) are up to 5.35 million, up from 4 million of recent years/months. But 27 percent of those sales are auction sales (i.e. foreclosed houses).

His conclusion: There’s a greater than 50 percent chance we’ll get out of this recession without a second dip (the so-called W-shaped recession, as in the 1980s). But not as high as an 80 percent chance.

And immigration? I asked what was the cause for the lack of household formation. His reply: He thought it was people doubling up, as in college graduates without jobs moving back in with parents, families moving in together, etc. That’s some of it, he says, but a demographer he talked with recently told him that immigration is turning around.

And that doesn’t mean that there’s just less of an increase. People are going home, he said. “And that’s bad for us – despite what the talk show guys say.” The reason is that the shrinking number of households is keeping the recovery from, well, recovering.

The anti-government Smart Growther

Blogging from “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

9:45 a.m. – Andres Duany, founder of Duany Plate-Zyberk and one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement, is proving that Smart Growth and “New Urbanist” are not synonymous with “bog-government liberal.” He’s talking about rebuilding New Orleans:
“The government has made affordable housing impossible, so that only government can deliver it.”
In America, he says, “We did three centuries of housing immigrants without a nickel. Then government busted in.” His point is that building standards, adopted with the best of motives, make it impossible to build the rudimentary housing that can serve as places for people without much money to live in.

And more on the problems in the U.S. planning process:
“We dumbed it down too much.” And we make decisions at the wrong level. Decisions that should have been made at the block level are made citywide – example: Chickens. “Chickens are so in.” Cities outlaw chickens citywide. That’s a decision that should depend on the different situations in different parts of town. But bike paths will be defeated if you make the decisions at the neighborhood level – people will always protest bike paths and greenways, Duany notes. That’s a decision that should be made at the regional level, because those amenities are important to the overall community.

Reinventing the City – Numbing the NIMBYs?

Here at “The Reinvented City” conference in Cambridge, Mass. First up, the always provocative Andres Duany, “a rock star of New Urbanism,” in the words of Anthony Flint of the sponsoring think tank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (Other sponsors: Nieman Foundation, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design).

9:15 a.m. – Duany – “For me the century started in 2007-2008. The pivotal events all occurred about 2008.” They were the bursting of real estate bubble, the public recognition of global warming, and the erasure of public confidence in government.

And he’s got a great riff going about the problem of the public process in planning. “There’s something radically wrong with the public process” in planning. “We dumbed it down too much.” And he says, the immediate neighbors are a special interest. Currently the immediate neighbors carry extra weight. But, he notes, “they are not the community as a whole.” They will block things that are in the larger interest – bike paths, schools, power lines for new alternative energy projects, etc.

“Large shopping malls are perfectly located to be future town centers. “

And for those who think New Urbanists and Smart Growth advocates are always pro-government. New Urbanist guru Duany is ow trashing government standards. His firm was trying to design a flood-proof house, which could be flooded and not be damaged. “And then we ran into government.”

Re New Orleans: It’s a Caribbean culture. “The Caribbean culture is not about the accumulation of wealth. It’s about the accumulation of leisure.” You can’t have leisure if you’re in debt. People lived in houses granddaddy owned, so there wasn’t much debt. “All the do-goody people are actually destroying the culture of New Orleans by eliminating leisure. And by raising the housing standards.”