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The International Monetary Fund has published some of the most peculiar econometric research in recent history in Irrational Exuberance in the US Housing Market: Were Evangelicals Left Behind? In it, Christopher Crowe associates the financial behavior of Evangelical Protestant Christians with more stable US markets during the housing bubble. It is well known that the housing bubble was concentrated in some metropolitan areas and largely missed others, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Indianapolis and many others, most of them with stronger underlying demand than in the metropolitan areas with huge house price increases. Crowe's research raises the possibility that Evangelicals kept house prices down by not speculating, due to their religious beliefs.

Evangelicals generally believe in missionary and conversion activities and tend to hold to beliefs that were largely liberalized in large portions, but not universally in the "mainstream" Protestant churches (such as Episcopal, United Church of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and Disciples of Christ churches) during the first half of the 20th century. In recent decades, Evangelical churches have grown strongly, Evangelical membership is now 50% greater than that of "mainstream" Protestantism (even with its Evangelical remnants), which has been relegated to "mainstream" in name only.

The Crowe thesis is generally that Evangelicals, allegedly with an "intense" belief in "end times" theology (such as the "imminent" return or the "second coming" of Jesus Christ) were less inclined to speculate in housing, which kept house prices from rising strongly in metropolitan areas with larger concentrations of Evangelicals.

There are some rather substantial difficulties with the thesis.

The first problem is relates to speculation. Rising prices are needed for there to be any incentive to speculate. If, for example, the numerous Evangelicals in Dallas-Fort Worth had undertaken a furious speculative frenzy, prices would not have gone up, instead more houses would have been built. This is because the liberal land use regime in Dallas-Fort Worth permits housing to be built in response to demand and nullifies any potential for speculative gain. Evangelicals, of course, like Catholics, Mainstream Protestants, Jews and Atheists are not stupid and were no more inclined to speculate on housing in the plentiful Dallas-Fort Worth market than they would have been climb over one another to offer higher prices for sand on the beach.

Another difficulty is that Crowe's characterization of Evangelical beliefs is a caricature. In fact, the nation's 40 million Evangelicals, including 15 million Southern Baptists more than 2 million Missouri Synod Lutherans, more than 1 million members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, non-denominational megachurch members and others behave similarly to other Americans in the economic sphere. Crowe hypothesizes that "that a belief in the end times reduces incentives to save simply because agents put a lower expectation on the future being realized." It would have been equally reliable to conjecture on the subsurface geology of an undiscovered planet.

Evangelicals like nice houses. They like nice cars. They like their children to be well clothed and to go to good schools. They do not refuse raises offered by their bosses because they expect shortly to be caught up into heaven like the prophet Elijah. True, some "end times" Christians have sold their property and trekked to mountaintops or otherwise awaited dates wrongly prophesied by their leaders. It happened in 1844 and in 1914, but these were not Evangelicals.

While Crowe’s research suggests an Evangelical stabilizing effect on housing markets, an opposite, but no less improbable thesis was advanced in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled "Did Christianity Cause the Housing Crash?" This article suggests that the "prosperity" gospel preached in some Evangelical churches led parishioners to take on obligations they could not afford, leading to the bursting of the bubble, though it is mercifully devoid of spurious regressions. Author Hanna Rosin names names, such as Joel Osteen of Houston's Lakewood Church and Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church in Southern California hosted President Obama as a candidate. It would not be surprising if a future article in The Atlantic pontificated about abandoned suburban megachurches.

One can only wonder what the other nearly 90 percent of Americans were doing while Evangelicals were simultaneously causing and preventing the housing bubble.

Wendell Cox a contributing editor of newgeography.com is the son of an Evangelical clergyman (Pentecostal), became Presbyterian and later an Episcopalian.

Photo: Hollywood Presbyterian Church: An Evangelical Church in a Mainstream Protestant Denomination (by the author).

California's precarious budget situation appears to be driving the state closer to potential fiscal ruin. The state is now 28 days into a new fiscal year, operating without a budget, and the deadlocked legislature in Sacramento appears unable and/or unwilling to strike a deal on a new budget able to cover the state's massive $19 billion deficit.

With no fix on the immediate horizon, California faces a cash shortage. State Controller John Chiang claims that at current burn rates, the state will find itself out of cash by October if the budget impasse continues. In order to sustain the state's remaining reserves for as long as possible, Chiang plans to start issuing IOUs to contractors "in August or September to preserve cash".

Today, in another effort to defer the date the state will run out of funds, Gov. Schwarzenegger issued an executive order requiring state employees to "take three unpaid days off per month." This move comes in the wake of the Governor's proposal to impose minimum wage pay on state workers to save money, currently stuck in the courts.

If the state legislature is unable to find a solution to the deficit, and creditors prove unwilling to accept more IOU's, California may be forced to effectively default on its debts. According to Newgeography contributor Bill Watkins, under such a scenario bond issues could fail, state operations grind to a halt, and the "mother of all financial crises" might be unleashed. Even if California is able to find ways to juggle debt load and convince creditors to accept IOU's while the budget impasse drags on, such stop-gap actions may place its already shaky credit rating at risk of being slashed further towards junk status. The state, legally unable to declare bankruptcy, must find some solution to its budget dilemma or it will become the first state to default since the Great Depression.

Los Angeles area transit officials celebrated 20 years of urban rail at a Staples Center event on July 23. Over the past 20 years, Los Angeles has opened 2 metro (subway) lines, 4 light rail lines and two exclusive busways (though apparently busways aren't worth celebrating). Surely, there is no question but that Los Angeles has been successful in opening a lot of new transit infrastructure.

At the same time, however, The Los Angeles Times reported that Professor James Moore of the University of Southern California, blames the disproportionate financial attention paid to rail projects reduced transit ridership by 1.5 billion (with a "b") over the same period. The reason is, as Tom Rubin put it, is that many more people can be carried for the same money on buses, "Had they run a lot of buses at low fares, they could have doubled the number of riders." Rubin was chief financial officer of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, one of the two predecessors of the present transit agency (MTA). The other was the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, to which I was appointed to three terms.

Transportation experts were also quoted to the effect that the rail system has done little to reduce traffic congestion or increase the use of mass transit much beyond the level in 1985, when planning for the Metro Blue Line began. Indeed. Traffic congestion has gotten much worse, and traffic volumes have increased materially. Our recent article showed that transit market shares had declined.

These results are in stark contrast to Houston, which in 1984 had the worst traffic congestion in the nation. Houston set about to solve the problem by expanding its roadway capacity. Since 1984, Houston's traffic grew twice as fast as that of Los Angeles, and population grew three times as fast (at least in part because many Californians were moving to Texas). Houston also added freeway mileage at double the percentage rate of Los Angeles. The reward was an increase in traffic congestion less than one-third that of Los Angeles (Figure). The most recent INRIX Scorecard shows Los Angeles traffic congestion to be more than 2.5 times as intense as Houston's.

Spending money on the right things makes a big difference. One can only wonder how different things might have been if Los Angeles had invested in the capacity people need (more roads) rather than in politically correct transit facilities that have no potential to reduce traffic congestion or to improve mobility and economic performance.

There is a lesson from Los Angeles experience both for other areas and other government functions. The test of government performance is outputs, not inputs. Thus, it is appropriate to celebrate large transit market share increases or significant improvements in student achievement, not how many miles of rail are built or how much money is spent on education.

Photograph: Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley (by the author)

Late on July 26 (Washington time), The Fifth Estate corrected the attribution by Professor Peter Newman of Curtain University to the effect that driving was down 43% and transit up 65% in the United States. This issue had been the subject of my column on the same morning. It was a simple decimal error (in the reporting) and has now been corrected on the site. Driving is now reported as being down 4.3% and transit up 6.5%. Professor Newman provided slides with the data to Ms. Tina Perinotti, who forwarded them to me.

While the new figures are less inconsistent with the official figures than the former, there are still material inconsistencies.

Driving Trend: Official Data: The slides provided simply refer to the two figures as relating to the past year, without a source or specific period. The 4.3% driving decline is more than double the largest annual decline reported by the official source for such information, the Federal Highway Administration (Figure 1).

Transit Trend: Official Data: We reviewed the data published from the official sources for transit data (the American Public Transportation Association and the Federal Transit Administration) and found no recent annual data indicating a 6.5% increase in ridership (either in boardings or in passenger miles). Much of the transit ridership gain from 2007 to the peak year of 2008 was lost in 2009, according to data posted by APTA in early March (Figure 2). A later first quarter report by APTA indicates further losses. Moreover, as we indicated in our article, the percentage decline in transit use since the peak year of 2008 is many times that of the decline in driving.

Not All Percentages Are the Same: Care must also be used in comparing percentage changes between transit and driving, because so little travel is on transit. For example, a one percent increase in roadway urban travel converts to about one-third of a mile per person per day. A one percent increase in transit use converts to about 30 feet per person per day, about the same distance as walking from one side to the other of the average bedroom and back.

Note: It is possible that the 4.3% driving decline was taken from an interim Federal Highway Administration report indicating that driving declined 4.3% in March 2008 compared to March 2007 (a monthly comparison, not a year on year comparison). This FHWA report, however, is subject to annual revision based upon the more comprehensive Highway Performance Monitoring System, which in 2009 revised the March 2008 such that the annual change became 2.7%.

Robert Sullivan’s recent article in New York magazine, “Subway on the Street”, marks a welcome addition to transportation discussions in New York City. New Yorkers are currently faced with seemingly paradoxical transportation plans that call for subway and bus service cuts, while relatively short and exceedingly expensive underground subways are being built (Sullivan discusses both).

However, also at the same time, a monumental partnership between the city’s transit agency (MTA) and the DOT is taking root. The result is a new bus rapid transit line in the Bronx – Bx12 SBS, short for “select bus service” – the focus of Sullivan’s article.

To be clear, bus rapid transit is not a New York innovation. Cities throughout the world, and in the United States, have experimented with bus rapid transit lines with general, albeit not absolute, success. But it is nonetheless refreshing to see the largest city in the United States accept buses as potential congestion relief tools.

Jay Walder, a New Yorker named head of the MTA after holding a similar position in London, brought the same promise of a more fully integrated bus and rail system to his home city.
Encouraging innovation, expanding applicability and increasing efficiency are not the exclusive domains of the private sector, even if it feels that way. New York is showing, as cities repeatedly do, the potential for public-sponsored reinvention as a result of resilience.

Howard Kozloff is Manager of Development Strategies and Director of Operations at Hart Howerton, an international strategy, planning and design firm based in New York, San Francisco and London.