San Francisco

San Francisco Muni's Difficult Choice

Wendell Cox — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The city of San Francisco provides additional evidence illustrating the hollowing out of downtown areas from the pandemic and policy responses. The city did a remarkable job in keeping its death rate low, despite its density. Yet, the nature of COVID transmission, intensified in insufficiently ventilated crowded enclosed spaces, makes it virtually impossible for life to go on as normal in the hyperdense central business districts (the highest downtown employment density, for example, in Manhattan is more than four times the highest residential density), like downtown San Francisco. It also preclude retention of the uniquely high transit market shares on systems that feed the largest downtown areas, such as San Francisco’s BART regional metro, with its nearly 90% reduction in ridership through most of the COVID crisis.

San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (“Muni”), which is the principal transit provider within the core city of San Francisco (with less than 10 percent of the Bay Area’s population), is asking questions about service design in the wake of the pandemic. Muni operates the streetcar, bus, trolley bus and cable car services that cover the city of San Francisco.

San Francisco’s central business district is the fourth largest in the United States, with nearly 400,000 jobs (also less than 10% of Bay Area employment). But transit is very important here --- before the pandemic, more than 55% of downtown workers got there by transit. This compares to about 7% of reached by transit in the rest of the Bay area.

Yet, the “writing on the wall,” has occurred to Muni’s transit planners, who are asking whether the downtown focus of the transit system should be retained, as service levels are restored. The current system orientation, along with two others have been put before residents for comment. The choices are:

The “Familiar Alternative,” which “would restore the all-day routes that haven’t been restored since the start of the pandemic. Muni officials said this scenario would allow riders to essentially return to their previous routes, would require “relatively little effort to implement,” and would acknowledge that some residents have chosen “where to live, or where to locate businesses, based on” the location of Muni lines.” Much of the service that was cancelled was on routes with low ridership.
The “Frequent Alternative,” which “would boost service on high- ridership Muni lines and improve connections to grocery stores, hospitals, schools and workplaces. Wait times and crowding would be decreased.” Muni officials said that this scenario would maximize ridership and shift “resources from downtown trips to those connecting local neighborhoods.”
The Hybrid Alternative,” which would seek to “balance the familiar and frequent alternatives by ‘truncating and extending routes and using the freed resources to increase frequencies’ on high-ridership Muni routes. This scenario would decrease wait times and crowding.”

These are difficult choices and from media reports, many transit agencies are barreling ahead simply assuming that the “old normal” will be restored. That the pre-World War I normal of commuting dominated by rail (subways, streetcars and interurbans) and walking has never even begun to be restored, despite the hundreds of billions (maybe even trillions) in spending should give pause.

My vote on Muni’s question is the same as I tried to formulate as policy while on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission four decades ago --- maximizing ridership. Then, I was disappointed to learn that there was little support for reallocating poorly used services (mainly in the suburbs, where I lived) to the parts of the county where people were being left at bus stops because buses were too full. Urban cores, transit as well as the riders and taxpayers, would well served by maximizing ridership. Meanwhile, Muni, thank you for asking.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photograph: Downtown San Francisco: Former Crocker Bank headquarters, Sales Force Tower and former McKesson headquarters from Union Square, left to right (by author)

Teach That Man Some Geography

Randal OToole — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Paul Krugman needs to learn some geography. Last week, he wrote, “there’s no more room for housing” in California unless they build up. After all, he notes, “San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles is ringed by mountains.”

Yes, San Francisco is on a peninsula. But, immediately to the south of the city is San Mateo County, which — according to census data — is 68 percent rural open space. South of San Mateo is Santa Clara County, home of San Jose, which is 74 percent rural.

Krugman may not know that there is bridge called the Golden Gate that connects San Francisco to Marin County, which is 84 percent rural open space. Another bridge called the Bay Bridge connects San Francisco to Alameda and Contra Costa counties, which are 63 and 57 percent rural open space. Between all of these counties together, more than two-thirds of the San Francisco Bay Area is rural open space.

In Los Angeles, a study funded by the state of California found that more than 800,000 acres of Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties are potentially developable. Over the hill, but a short drive away from Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have millions of acres of developable land.

Krugman also needs to learn some construction economics. He thinks that, because people in Manhattan live in mid-rises and high-rises, everyone else should be able to do so. But not everyone else is a Nobel-prize winning professor and most people can’t afford to live in such expensive buildings. As California developer Nicholas Arenson testified at a meeting on housing prices, mid rises (four to seven stories) cost three to four times as much while high rises (eight stories and up) cost 5.5 to 7.5 times as much per square foot as single-family homes.

Moreover, most people don’t want to live in apartments or condos. As an economist, Krugman should know something that is fundamental to economics: personal preferences count. Numerous surveys show that around 80 percent of Americans of all age groups prefer single-family homes over living in mid-rise or high-rise apartments.

A Gallup poll conducted shortly before the pandemic found that 40 percent of Americans who live in big cities would rather live in smaller towns or low-density suburbs, while more Americans want to live in suburbs and exurbs than actually live there. The pandemic has heightened these desires.

So if people would rather live in single-family homes, why are so much of the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas still rural? The answer is that, forty to fifty years ago, some people who didn’t understand geography and thought that California was running out of land drew urban-growth boundaries that put all of those rural areas off-limits to development. Under California law, once drawn such boundaries are practically impossible to move.

Thanks to the artificial land shortages created by these growth boundaries, urban land in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas is ten times more expensive than land in urban areas that don’t have such boundaries. When combined with the added costs of building mid-rise and high-rise housing, it is clear that density only makes housing more expensive, not more affordable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O’Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo credit: Junkyardsparkle via Wikimedia.

The One Element Missing from the Discussion of Housing in CA: Tolerance

John Mirisch — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 20:28:58 -0400

In California we pride ourselves on being very tolerant of a diverse array of lifestyles and lifestyle choices. Dress how it suits you; love whom you love; define yourself in accordance with your own preferences. Do your own thing. Sing your own song. Dance your own dance. The Californian thing is to live and let live.

Except, evidently, when it comes to housing-lifestyle choices. If living in a home with a garden is your thing, you probably shouldn’t expect Californian tolerance from a certain group of people who with cult-like zeal will tell you that your lifestyle is bad, wrong, immoral, and even “racist.”

In many ways, the discussion of housing in California has devolved into a thinly-veiled propaganda war on single-family neighborhoods. The elimination of single-family neighborhoods through upzoning is the main policy prescription offered by YIMBY’s and Sacramento politicians who self-servingly scapegoat local communities and who want to impose one-size-fits-all regulations on cities and communities throughout the state.

Part of the war on single-family neighborhoods includes demonizing single-family homeowners as “selfish” and “only concerned about property values” (an absurd allegation, since the kind of upzoning being proposed would make those single-family properties worth significantly more).

Many Americans of all stripes live in single-family neighborhoods or aspire to live in them, and yet there are many who are attempting to delegitimize this housing-lifestyle choice. Never mind that for many living in a single-family neighborhood still represents the American dream.

Let’s get this straight: there is nothing wrong with living in a home with a garden in a neighborhood of homes with gardens, just as there is nothing wrong with living in Manhattan-style density - or any variation in between. These are all lifestyle choices which in most cases are very personal.

So why all of this rhetoric, with loaded phrases like “exclusionary zoning,” and these toxic attempts to paint single-family neighborhoods as immoral, racist, and evil?

Well, for one thing, this war on single-family neighborhoods serves the larger agenda of the Urban Growth Machine: the upzoning and deregulation of single-family neighborhoods, where developers could build a lot of profitable luxury condos, offers exciting new horizons in real estate ROI.

This is because at its core, forced density proponents are looking at housing as an investment vehicle rather than as a place to live or as a home. If we examine their rhetoric and “arguments,” we can see that most YIMBY’s are in reality WIMBY’s (Wall Street in my backyard).

So, yes, it’s ultimately all about the money, with the anti-single family neighborhood narrative serving to “justify” measures which would eliminate these neighborhoods in favor of “products” which lend themselves well to speculative investments from Wall Street, private equity, and global capital. Turning us from a nation of homeowners into a nation of renters is also a great way for Wall Street to generate recurring revenue, the “gift that keeps on giving.”

Three main points are usually made to advocate for upzoning and to “justify” the elimination of single-family neighborhoods: forced density as a path to housing affordability; forced density as a response to a racist legacy; and forced density as a way to combat climate change.

These are all red herrings.

The “racist” argument is perhaps the most disingenuous of the three; and what is particularly ironic about the neoliberal move to deregulate housing is that it takes urban planning away from communities and puts banks and the real estate industry in charge, completely ignoring the role of banks and the real estate industry in undermining Black homeownership.

Of course, for anyone really interested in equity, the remedy to the redlining and restrictive covenants of the past would be to put policies in place which help to lift those impacted by them and allow them to partake of the kind of housing-lifestyle choice from which they were previously excluded: i.e. allowing them to become homeowners and to live in single-family neighborhoods.

The “upzoning will create more housing affordability” canard is almost as disingenuous. Essentially, we’re looking at a version of Reaganomic “trickle-down” policy, gussied up to be less offensive to self-styled “progressives.”

The only problem: it doesn’t work. It didn’t work as Reaganomic policy and it doesn’t create meaningful affordability with housing either.

The environmental argument that “forced density is an effective way to combat climate change” is likely the most insidious of the arguments. It ignores the fact that environmental impacts related to climate change are overwhelmingly linked to wealth, not density. And it consciously attempts to divert our attention from the problem of rampant consumerism, “fairytales of eternal economic growth” and the dystopia caused by the overconcentration of opportunity in “superstar” cities that are supposed to redeem the world. Instead, the solution to an overconcentration of most things, including opportunity, is clearly deconcentration).

The quasi-religious fervor and fundamental intolerance with which forced density advocates preach their anti-housing pluralism agenda is sometimes startling. Whether those railing against single-family neighborhoods with the zeal of cult members had unhappy childhoods in suburbia, or whether the motives are purely financial, the intolerant rhetoric against homes with gardens has been ratcheted up to the level where we can read that becoming a homeowner in a single-family neighborhood actually makes you a bad person.

And yet what the WIMBY’s conveniently forget is that the top three densest urban areas in the US are already all in CA (LA, followed by San Francisco and San Jose, in that order), and that there are 1.2 million vacant units in the state vs. a housing deficit of 820k. In a country that embraces the principles of pluralism, urban areas should offer a wide variety of living accommodations and lifestyle choices for families and people from all walks of life. And that includes single-family neighborhoods.

We should be tolerant of those choices.

Many of our most pressing problems can be solved locally, within our own communities, by tending to our own gardens. And, no, there is absolutely nothing wrong with actually having your own garden to tend to, despite what the Urban Growth Machine would have you believe.

California, for all the talk of “sacrificing single-family neighborhoods” in what ultimately amounts to the further commodification of housing in the name of increasing developer profits, is currently leading the nation in intolerance, arrogance, one-sidedness, and extremism in our discussions on housing.

It’s time for that to change. It’s time for Californians to be as tolerant of each other’s housing-lifestyle choices as they are about any other lifestyle choices. Dance your own dance. Sing your own song. Live, laugh, and love where and how it makes you happy. And do your own thing -- even if planting your own garden in your own backyard is your own thing.

John Mirisch has been a member of the Beverly Hills City Council since 2009, having served three terms as Mayor. He is currently a garden-variety councilmember.

Photo credit: Jeff Silva via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Company Headquarters Leaving California in Unprecedented Numbers

Joseph Vranich and Lee Ohanian — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 20:28:58 -0400

For the first six months of 2021, the number of companies relocating their headquarters out of California is running at twice the rate of recent years and is showing no signs of slowing, according to a study issued today by Spectrum Location Solutions and the Hoover Institution.

The research provides the most detailed and comprehensive data on relocations of California business headquarters from 2018 to the first half of 2021, documenting that departures during the first half of this year are double the rate for each of the three previous years.

The report, Why Company Headquarters Are Leaving California in Unprecedented Numbers, found that 265 companies moved their headquarters to other states from Jan. 1, 2018, through June 30, 2021. The California exits have more than doubled in the first six months of 2021 (a total of 74 relocations for a monthly average of 12.3) higher than during all of 2020 (62 for a monthly average of 5.2), all of 2019 (78 for a monthly average of 6.5), and 2018 (58 for a monthly average of 4.8).

The exits are occurring across virtually all industries, according to the authors Joseph Vranich, President of Spectrum Location Solutions and Lee S. Ohanian, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution and Distinguished Professor of Economics, UCLA.

Several economic factors have led to these departures such as rising business costs, decreased productivity and reduced profitability. Contributing factors include high taxes, harsh regulatory policies, above-average labor costs, excessive litigation costs, soaring energy and utility costs, and concerns about a declining quality of life related to California’s unaffordable housing costs.

The study is brimming with information including naming the companies that departed, listing the locations they left and their destination communities, and discusses the economic reasons why the relocations are occurring at an accelerating rate.

The winning state is Texas, which for many years has been the most popular destination for California company relocations while Tennessee ranked No. 2 and Arizona No. 3. Many headquarters dispersed to the South and Midwest, states that are sometimes unfairly disparaged as “flyover country.”

The California county experiencing the highest headquarters loss in the study period is Los Angeles at 54, followed by San Francisco at 47, and Orange at 29. Counties in Silicon Valley – Santa Clara, Alameda and San Mateo – are losing high-tech company headquarters as they seek to tap the growing availability of tech talent in states that also offer lower operating costs and a friendlier business environment.

“Some of the small businesses of today will become the blockbusters of tomorrow, and California is losing far too many of these potential game changers,” observed the authors. “California is also losing the gifted creators of these businesses, creators who may start additional transformative businesses in their lifetimes. And if they do, these new businesses will not be launched in California.”

“Unless policy reforms reverse this course, California will continue to lose businesses, both large established businesses, as well as young, rapidly growing businesses.”

When company headquarters migrate out of California, significant economic costs affect not only the state but communities as well-compensated employees depart and no longer patronize local businesses or pay taxes.

Three previous California Governors – Gray Davis, Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian – cited findings from an earlier version of Vranich’s work when expressing concerns about companies shifting their operations out of state.

The full report is available at Why Company Headquarters Are Leaving California in Unprecedented Numbers.

Also online is a commentary entitled California Businesses Headquarters Are Now Leaving Twice as Fast, With No End in Sight.

Joseph Vranich of Spectrum Location Solutions is a site selection consultant providing location advisory services to corporations. In recent years he has discussed California’s business environment with more than 100 economic development agencies located in North America and Europe.

Lee Ohanian is a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution and Distinguished Professor of Economics, UCLA. He writes for California on Your Mind, a twice-weekly journal published by the Hoover Institution about California politics and economic policies, and how they affect California's economy.

Photo credit: Jill Siegrist, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Battle for Cities

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 20:28:58 -0400

America’s cities face an existential crisis that threatens their future status as centers of culture, politics, and the economy. Many urban advocates continue to delude themselves that U.S. cities are about to experience a massive post-pandemic return to “normal.” But the disruptive technological, demographic, and social changes of recent times are more likely to upend the old geographic hierarchy than to revive it.

A representative New York Times article from July 12 denied that the pandemic has impacted dense urban areas in particular, and blamed negative attitudes toward cities instead on what it called “alluring” anti-urban attitudes. Perhaps urban advocates need to ditch their own attitudes and confront reality (and the statistical evidence): Many key problems facing our core cities—growing social instability, rising crime, out-migration, increasingly radicalized politics, high costs, and tight regulation—predate the pandemic, and are not likely to go away easily. Clever proselytizing by urban media likely won’t be enough to convince Americans liberated by the efficacy of remote work to eventually return.

To survive and thrive, American cities need to reinvent urbanity by returning to a more diverse economy concentrated not in the central districts but in neighborhoods stretched across the city. Such a shift can only take place if the trajectory of urban politics changes. Some cities, notes Seth Barron, author of the newly published The Last Days of New York, have been captured by “an equity oriented social ideology” paid for by real estate interests and public sector unions, and backed by mainstream media and nonprofits, that has proven profoundly self-destructive. Outside New York, political leadership in cities like Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis; Seattle; and San Francisco continue to work assiduously to restrain law enforcement, even in the face of rising crime.

There appears to be a growing pushback against the progressive urban agenda, whose journalistic promoters often minimize social disorder. Defunding the police has not turned out to be a progressive success; the five cities that reduced their police budgets the most in 2020—Austin, Texas; New York; Minneapolis; Seattle; and Denver—have seen murders spike over the past year, well above the national average. Having partially gone down the path of defunding in 2020, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland, California, have now taken steps to restore some police funding. In ultraliberal San Francisco, the vast majority of city residents want more police; almost half are considering leaving the city, citing social disorder as a key reason. Residents of the fashionable Capitol Hill area in Seattle are erecting barriers to keep out the homeless.

But if the urban gentry are upset, the real shift is further down the social pecking order. The surprising victory of ex-cop Eric Adams as New York’s next mayor took place amid a surge in violent crime, garnering support for his centrist, pro-police platform from the city’s minority voters. My colleague Charles Blain, president of the Urban Reform and Urban Reform Institute in Houston, noted that opposition to “defunding” has come primarily from African American and Latino politicos in his city, while support seems to stem mostly from affluent white liberals.

Political divides within cities increasingly defy traditional definitions of right and left. There’s a growing conflict between those largely dependent on public schools, spaces, and transit, and those free of the need for public services due to their ability to live close to work, send their kids to private schools, or choose not to have kids at all. Much of the base of urban radicalism has shifted from minority communities to the ultrawoke, largely white, educated left.

Yet progressives, due in part to small voter turnouts, still dominate representative bodies like the New York City Council; the newly elected Manhattan district attorney follows the left’s program of low-intensity crime enforcement. In Buffalo and Pittsburgh, recent elections have favored far-left candidates. In Philadelphia, a recent attempt to remove the George Soros-backed District Attorney Larry Krassner failed miserably, despite rising crime.

The current urban trajectory is downwind of demographics. Despite the media hurrahs of a massive “back to the city” movement, Americans have been moving in the opposite direction for most of the past decade. Since 2012, suburbs and exurbs have accounted for about 90% of all metropolitan growth. The rate of growth in America’s biggest and most expensive cities began to decline as early as 2015, and the population shift to suburbs, exurbs, and smaller cities has accelerated, something evident well before the pandemic.

Read the rest of this piece at Tablet Magazine.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: JJ, via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License.

Urban Sociopaths

Randal OToole — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Sociopaths are people who “have no regard for others’ rights or feelings, lack empathy and remorse for wrongdoings, and have the need to exploit and manipulate others.” That definition perfectly fits New Urban planners and the environmentalists who support them.

I could be referring to planners eager to inflict congestion on commuters in order to persuade a few of them to take transit. But today I’m referring to planners eager to drive up housing prices in order to force more people to live in multifamily housing.

Surveys have consistently shown that the vast majority of Americans of every generation prefer a single-family home with a yard over living in a condo or apartment. These preferences have only been strengthened by the pandemic.

Yet planners and planning advocates openly seek to thwart those preferences and increase the share of Americans living in multifamily housing. The chief tool they use is to limit the supply of land for single-family homes, thus driving up housing costs. But that isn’t enough: they also want to construct more multifamily housing in the existing urban footprint, which in many cases means tearing down single-family homes and replacing them with apartments or condos.

New Urbanist David Larson, writing in the Federalist, argues that “more Americans could live in beautiful neighborhoods if the Right stopped propping up suburbia.” What he means is that the suburbs should be forced to discard single-family zoning so that high-density housing projects can be built in their midst. One of the reasons we should do this, he says, is that “suburbia is undeniably ugly.” Wait a minute — I thought the suburbs were beautiful? He can’t seem to get his story straight.

But the real problem is his assumption that low-income people want to live in multifamily housing. In fact, they don’t want to live in second-class housing any more than they want to use second-class transportation (meaning transit). Moreover, single-family housing can be built that is much more affordable than multifamily, which tends to cost far more per square foot.

Then there was an article on the San Francisco Chronicle claiming that single-family zoning is costing San Franciscans hundreds of thousands of dollars per home. The writer bases this conclusion on a paper by Wharton Business School researchers Joseph Gyourko and Jacob Krimmel.

However, nowhere in that paper do the researchers blame high housing prices on single-family zoning. In fact, the words “single-family zoning” don’t even appear in the paper. Instead, they blame high housing prices on “supply constraints.” The chief supply constraints in the San Francisco Bay Area are the urban-growth boundaries that confine development to the existing urbanized area, which occupies just 30 percent of the region.

Thanks to those growth boundaries, less than 45 percent of Bay Area households live in single-family detached homes. In many urban areas that don’t have such constraints, the share is greater than 70 percent. So more than a quarter of Bay Area residents are prevented from achieving their dream of living in a single-family home, and the Chronicle wants to make it even more by replacing existing single-family homes with apartments.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

California Fleeing

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.

Reality reveals a different picture. California may be a great state in many ways, but it also is clearly breaking bad. Since 2000, 2.6 million net domestic migrants, a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, and Anaheim combined, have moved from California to other parts of the United States. (See Figure 1.) California has lost more people in each of the last two decades than any state except New York—and they’re not just those struggling to compete in the high-tech “new economy.” During the 2010s, the state’s growth in college-educated residents 25 and over did not keep up with the national rate of increase, putting California a mere 34th on this measure, behind such key competitors as Florida and Texas. California’s demographic woes are real, and they pose long-term challenges that need to be confronted.

Source: Derived from U.S. Census Bureau Estimates

The state has suffered net outmigration in every year of the twenty-first century, but its smallest losses occurred in the early 2000s and the years following the Great Recession, when housing affordability was closer to the national average. Home prices have risen since then—and so have departures. Between 2014 and 2020, net domestic outmigration rose from 46,000 to 242,000, according to Census Bureau estimates.

The outmigration does not seem to have reached a peak. Roughly half of state residents, according to a 2019 UC Berkeley poll, have considered leaving. In Los Angeles, according to a USC survey, 10 percent plan to move out this year. The most recent Census Bureau estimates show that California started falling behind national population growth in 2016 and went negative for the first time in modern history last year.

The comforting tale that only the old, bitter, and uneducated are moving out simply does not withstand scrutiny. An analysis of IRS data through 2019 confirms that increasing domestic migration is not dominated by the youngest or oldest households. Between 2012 and 2019, tax filers under 26 years old constituted only 4 percent of net domestic outmigrants. About 77 percent of the increase came among those in their prime earning years of 35 to 64. In 2019, 27 percent of net domestic migrants were aged 35 to 44, while 21 percent were aged 55 to 64. (See Figure 2.)

Source: IRS data

To be sure, the largest increase in net domestic migration was among those aged 65 and over. But the second-largest increase came in the 25 to 34 categories—with the state’s exorbitantly high cost of living the likely culprit.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

Photo: Outer suburbs of Los Angeles (western San Bernardino County), by Wendell Cox.

The Toxic Progressive Left

Adam Mayer — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Baizuo definition from Urban Dictionary:

"Baizuo (白左, White Leftists) is a popular Mainland Chinese term coined for a specific subset of Westerners who are despised by most Chinese for their pretentiousness, hypocritical behavior and an overbearing sense of entitlement.

Baizuo are mostly characterized by their heavy use of political correctness and double standards to covertly advance their own material or emotional interests at the expense of others while claiming otherwise from a self-assumed superior moral position."

Dion Lim is a San Francisco Bay Area-based news reporter for the local ABC affiliate KGO-TV. For the past year, Lim has been tirelessly reporting on the appalling hate-driven assaults on Asian residents in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area region. In addition to reporting these incidents for the local news channel, Lim keeps her followers informed through her social media accounts on Instagram and Twitter.

Given the service that Lim is doing by following up with victims and keeping the public informed of criminal charges against suspects, she deserves applause for her hard work and fortitude. Not only are the sheer number of violent assaults targeting Asian victims dizzying to keep up with, they surely take a mental and emotional toll.

It is frankly bizarre, then, that the Washington Post recently published an opinion piece in what is essentially a hit piece on Lim, accusing her of distorting facts surrounding a San Francisco attempted carjacking that took place in March of this year. The author of the piece is someone named Radley Balko – a writer who lives in Tennessee. Upon closer examination, it seems that his only tie to San Francisco is his support for the local District Attorney, Chesa Boudin.

This is an important point because Balko's Washington Post piece is as much an attack on Lim's reporting as its defense of his buddy Boudin. This is not surprising given that Lim has been a tough critic of Boudin over his handling of several of these anti-Asian hate crimes. Not only that, but Lim often points to the failure of Boudin's office to charge known violent felons appropriately, sometimes resulting in fatal consequences.

In a tragic case in San Francisco's SoMa District on New Year's Eve, a repeat offender who was out on parole named Troy McAlister hit and killed two women in a crosswalk driving in a stolen vehicle while high on meth. One of the victims was a young Japanese woman by the name of Hanako Abe. In an interview with Lim, Abe's mother raised questions about why McAlister was even out on the streets in the first place:

"It makes me question why this happened, and I hope that this incident gets revealed and investigated. For example, was it right for the suspect to be released? Was it right for him to be on parole?"

Read the rest of this piece at Adam Mayer.Substack.com.

Adam Mayer is an architect based in California. In addition to his job designing buildings he writes the China Urban Development Blog.

Follow him on Twitter: @AdamNMayer

Record Low Congestion Levels – Seattle, LA, San Francisco: The 2021 Urban Mobility Report

Wendell Cox — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute has released its 2021 Urban Mobility Report, which provides traffic data for the pandemic year of 2020. Throughout much of the year, traffic congestion fell materially. This is confirmed by the 2021 Travel Time Index, which the report defines as the “The ratio of travel time in the peak period to travel time at free‐flow conditions. A Travel Time Index of 1.30 indicates a 20‐minute free‐flow trip takes 26 minutes in the peak period.”

This article analyzes “congestion levels” (the term used by the Tom Tom Traffic Index, which rates international urban areas), converting the Travel Time Index to a percentage signifying the longer travel time due to traffic congestion. For example, a trip that would take 20 minutes in free flow conditions (no congestion), but which takes 26 minutes would have a Transit Time Index of 1.30 (26 divided by 20). The 26-minute travel time (called congestion level here) would be 30% longer than the uncongested time of 20 minutes.

The improved congestion level was substantial. Among the 101 intensively studied urban areas, the congestion level was 11% in 2020, a 62% drop from the 28% rate of 2019. This is below the first year’s (1982) figure of 12% and is the lowest congestion rate in the Urban Mobility Report’s 39 years (Figure 1).

Trend in the 10 Most Congested Urban Areas: 2019

The congestion level improvement was particularly evident in 2020 compared to 2019. New York had the worst congestion level in 2020. Among the 10 urban areas with the highest congestion levels in 2019, six established new minimum records.Four others failed to set new low records, but still enjoyed their best congestion levels in years.In fact, all 10 urban areas registered a better congestion level in 2020 than in any year in more than three decades.

Figure 2 shows 2020 congestion levels compared to 2019, and Figure 3 compares the 2020 congestion levels the all-time previous lows from over the first 38 years of the Urban Mobility Report.

New York: Worst 2020 Traffic Congestion

New York (ranked 6th in 2019) replaced Los Angeles with the highest congestion level, 17% in 2020. Even so, congestion declined significantly --- down 53% from the 2019 figure of 36%. New York’s 2020 congestion level was only slightly above its 38 year low of 15%. However the 2020 congestion level was lower than any year since 1986.

Transit ridership has recovered far less strongly than auto use in New York, which has by far the strongest transit commuting share in the nation. Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) data shows that on June 29, New York City subway (including Staten Island) ridership remained 55% below last year. Buses have done a bit better, at a 44% reduction. MTA commuter rail ridership was down even more --- 59% on the Long Island and 62% on the Metro-North. In contrast, the MTA’s auto and truck toll bridges and tunnels were down only 2%.

Six All-Time Minimum Congestion Levels Achieved

Six urban areas had the lowest congestion level ever recorded in the Annual Mobility Report.

The Seattle congestion level of 11% was 42.1% below its previous minimum of 19%. Seattle’s congestion level fell the most relative to its previous minimum. In one year, Seattle’s 2020 congestion level dropped 71.1% from 2019. Seattle experienced the largest drop in its minimum congestion level from the previous 38 years.

The Los Angeles congestion level of 16% was 40.6% below its previous minimum of 27%. The congestion level declined 69.2%, from 52% in 2019 to 16% in 2020. Los Angeles had the worst congestion level in the nation from 1982 to 2019, but had the fourth worst congestion level in 2020.

San Francisco nearly equaled the Los Angeles performance, with a 2020 congestion level 38.3% below its previous minimum. San Francisco had a 2020 congestion level of 16%, down 68.6% from 2019.

Honolulu had a congestion level of 11%, 30.6% below its previous low. Portland’s 10% congestion level bested its previous low by 27.1%. Washington’s congestion level of 12% was 20.0% below its previous low.

Four All-Time Minimum Congestion Levels Not Achieved

Three urban areas among the top 10 other than New York failed to set new minimum records in 2020. San Jose had a congestion level 9.1% above its minimum (12%), but still the best congestion level since 1985. San Diego had a congestion level 25% above its minimum (10%), but the best result since 1985 Austin had a congestion level 30% above its minimum (13%), but the best result since 1988.

Future Congestion Levels: More Like 2020 than 2019?

The authors note that the 2020 data was composed of distinct periods, the initial normal congestion levels before the pandemic in the early part of the year, followed by the huge congestion level reductions of 60 to 75% during the business shutdowns that followed, and then a gradual congestion level increase that reached half of previous levels over the second half of the year.

The drivers of the congestion level improvement were higher unemployment rates and the increase in remote work. Fortunately, the increase in remote work kept the unemployment rate much lower than would have occurred otherwise. The average monthly unemployment rate of 8.1% in 2020 was the same as in 2012.

Yet the congestion levels were markedly different between 2012 and 2020. In 2012, the national congestion level was 26%. In 2020, the national congestion level was 11%, 58% lower. With the employment and unemployment rates virtually the same in 2012 and 2020, the congestion level reduction results to a substantial degree from the enormous increase in remote work. Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom estimated that working at home reached 42% of US full time employment during the pandemic. This is more than seven times the work at home job access figure from 2019 (5.7%).

The benefits were substantial. There was a 50% reduction in annual delay hours, which freed commuters to spend more time at leisure, with their families and other pursuits moreinviting than sitting in traffic.The lower congestion levels converted into considerable environmental benefits, with excess fuel consumption dropping 51% from 2019 to 2020. Greenhouse gas emissions from peak period commutes dropped 50%.

It is notable that the congestion level dropped, with virtually no public expenditure aimed at luring people out of the driver’s seat. In contrast, the principal urban planning strategy has been to substitute transit for driving, which has cost more than $1.5 trillion (2018$) in subsidies over 50 years. This has not reduced congestion levels, which rose substantially from 1982 to 2019, even in urban areas with the best transit service. For example, the New York area, with by far the highest transit ridership in the nation and the largest system experienced a 1982 to 2019 congestion level increase (140%) greater than that of auto oriented Houston (55%).

It is generally expected that flexible, hybrid work arrangements will be more extensive in the future. Many more employees are likely to work full-time or part-time at home and drive to physical workplaces less often. A number of large employers, such Apple, Google, National Insurance and others have announced that they will adopt higher levels of working at home. It is possible that future Urban Mobility Report congestion levels will resemble those of 2020 much more than those of 2019 and before.

Photo: Exchange Plaza, Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (Triborough Bridge), New York, urban area with the nation’s highest congestion level (2020). Credit: Jet Lowe via Library of Congress website under Public Domain.

More Racially Biased Energy Costs Favored by BAAQMD

Ronald Stein — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Even though Californians are the most environmentally regulated population on the planet, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD is proposing a new Rule 6-5 to further reduce particulate emissions from some of the cleanest refineries in the world.

The Agency’s planned emissions controls would ultimately serve only to reduce supplies and raise energy costs even higher for everyone in the region: residents, businesses, and government entities. The BAAQMD actions would hit the poor and those on fixed incomes the hardest, creating a disparate impact in terms of equity, racially biasing more energy costs upon those that can least afford it, while the climate and weather would remain the same.

The Bay Area is home to 44 percent of California’s refining capacity. BAAQMD Rule 6-5, if approved, is expected to force the shutdown, or financially cripple the PBF Martinez and Chevron Richmond refineries in Northern California, as well as the closure of the many businesses in the surrounding counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma that support those major refineries.

California refineries are the world’s cleanest and most monitored because they operate in the most environmentally-regulated location on earth – the State of California. Hopefully the BAAQMD is cognizant that oil and gas are not just an American industry with its 131 operating refineries in the U.S. as of January 2020 per the Energy Information Administration (EIA), but an international industry with about 700 refineries worldwide that service the demands of 8 billion people.

To date, other American refineries have ceased making conventional hydrocarbon-based motor fuels by shutting down or converting to making renewable diesel, bringing the total closer to 125 operating refineries in the U.S.

The effect of shuttering the supply from California refineries is that the state’s demand for energy would need to be met by imports from foreign suppliers located halfway around the world with significantly less stringent environmental, workplace safety, and human rights controls than California, resulting in increased global emissions, and increased energy costs for Californians. Whether crude or products are imported, Californians pay an environmental penalty due to lax regulations in other countries.

Over the years, we have all seen the impact on California fuel prices when one of the few remaining refinery manufacturers temporarily shuts down for maintenance, or what the industry refers to as a “turnaround.” Gas prices historically spike during these temporary outages. Today, we are seeing prices rise directly because of the permanent closure of the Marathon Martinez Refinery, which cited regulatory costs as a factor in their decision, with fuel prices now at record highs in the Bay Area versus Los Angeles,

Crippling the PBF Martinez and Chevron Richmond refineries will cut off Northern California’s reliable local supply of fuels to meet the demands of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel for the military, airports, ports, delivery fleets, and other critical infrastructure.

If BAAQMD Rule 6-5 is implemented and local refineries shut down, the state will have to rely on imports from China, the world’s largest polluter, as well as other unreliable foreign countries for the supply of energy to meet the demands of our mobile lifestyles. This will increase worldwide emissions and further hike transportation costs for all 40 million residents of the State.

Read the rest of this piece at CA Political Review.

Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.

Photo credit: Pedro Szekely via Flickr under Public Domain License.