Urban Issues

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.

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.

About That Asian Crime Ring in Santa Ana: An Incomplete, Imperfect – and Honest – First Draft of History

Jerry Sullivan — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Here’s a fact that appears to be lost in SoCal these days: You can condemn “Anti-Asian Hate” and also oppose Asian-American criminals.

You can hold those two distinct thoughts at the same time with no logical conflict.

I know so because I’ve been to Santa Ana, where a ring of Vietnamese-American criminals is making it harder for a lot of good folks to keep their good neighborhoods in good order.

* * *

You don’t have to hate anybody or anything to regret and oppose criminals who profit from exploiting society’s weak points, tears in our social fabric, pockets of vulnerability on the block or around the corner.

That’s a simple matter of knowing right from wrong.

Emotions are a different matter, though, more difficult to properly weigh.

The word “hate” summons plenty of emotions.

Add a more specific qualifier—“ethnic,” “racial” or “Asian”—and more emotions pour forth.

There is a reckoning about race and ethnicity at hand in America for some valid reasons—and those include many emotional aspects of the subject.

Such acknowledgements don’t make this reckoning of ours any less difficult, though. It remains our great obligation to find the proper measure of emotions to leaven anecdotal recollections, personal accounts, historical context, and empirical data about racial relations in America.

It is not at all clear that we’ve hit upon the right mix so far.
It has become quite clear that some volatile combination of emotion and fact often animates the reckoning.

Codify that combination in the form of academic theory and you enter new and challenging territory.

Make that theory the basis of journalistic coverage of racial relations in America, and you risk warping the story of how we handle this challenge with preconceived notions.

* * *

Journalism is often called the first draft of history for good reason. That’s what good journalism gives us even if it is incomplete by definition and imperfect by nature. Historians can sort out and make good use of the stuff so long as the effort is honest and diverse perspectives are available for consideration.

Fitting journalism into predetermined angles based on academic theory turns it into a revised edition of history and a preemptive outline for the future.

It’s notable that the media is not alone in struggling how to handle sensitivities on racial relations.

* * *

Let’s go back to Santa Ana, where both the police department and media outlets seem to have forgotten how to deliver facts and let members of the public consider them through their own intellectual and emotional lenses.

It was December of last year, when the FBI charged a Santa Ana Police Department officer named Steven Lopez with taking bribes “from a crime figure seeking to thwart law enforcement activities against his illegally operating businesses,” according to federal investigators.

That’s about all anyone was told—and even after Lopez pleaded guilty the local legacy and digital media didn’t bring forth any information about whom he might have been protecting. An officer was charged with corruption related to illegal activities on the streets of Santa Ana—and that’s about all the 340,000 or so residents of the city needed to know, the police and press seemed to agree.

The minimal communication looked to me like poor public policy.

The weak follow-up coverage struck me as bad journalism—a failure to serve the public interest under the auspices of the 1st Amendment.
It looked even worse when I considered that the meek coverage might have stemmed from a reluctance to cover the story because it pointed to a crime ring of Asian-Americans.

* * *

I did some reporting of my own, and soon noticed indicators of links between the crooked cop and a crime ring based in the Vietnamese-American community that’s centered in the Little Saigon district, which includes sections of Santa Ana and several other cities in Orange County. Neither the feds nor Santa Ana PD would talk—but there were other sources to tap, word on the street to monitor (you can see SullivanSays’ prior coverage here).

A number of sources connected some dots, noting that concerns ran deeper than gambling. By then there had been at least three murders tied to gambling this year in Santa Ana, and the cops had seized dozens of guns and various narcotics linked to at least 40 illegal dens.

The Orange County Register—the largest media outlet in the local market—largely left the story of the corrupt cop and the gambling dens in separate silos as part of glancing coverage. Voice of OC—a digital operation that gets a lot of awards from journalists’ organizations—seemed to adopt a union steward’s perspective on the story. Its coverage of the corruption case centered on the question of why the cop in question continued to get paid while his legal case played out.

Overlooked by both the Register and Voice of OC is the question of what was—and is—going on across the neighborhoods of Santa Ana. They have failed to connect any dots—facts, circumstances, concerns of people in the neighborhoods. They have buried a bigger story with wider implications for hard-working residents and neighborhoods of the city.

Buried even deeper is the question of whether the local media took a pass on going hard after the story because it involved Vietnamese-Americans running a crime ring. Did they ease off because the facts didn’t fit the parameters of their news judgment at a time when a focus on “Anti-Asian Hate” was the order of the day for much of the legacy, digital and social media?

To put it another way: Did they decline the difficult mission of writing the first draft of history, deciding to wait until it’s safe to write a revised edition, fully approved by theorists?

* * *

I continued to follow up on the story, getting enough documentation from Santa Ana PD to draw a line between a group of Vietnamese-Americans and the illegal gambling dens that threaten public safety in the city.
Reliable sources drew a line between Lopez—the crooked cop—and the crime ring.

I also learned that the cops of the Santa Ana Police Department have done yeoman’s work in battling the crime ring—and they appear to have done it in a remarkably effective way. Word around the city’s Civic Center says that the early response to the gambling dens, conducted under the banner of “Operation Community First,” saw numerous raids lead to dozens of arrests but not a single use of serious force by Santa Ana PD officers against any detainees.

So here’s what we’re dealing with:

A ring of Vietnamese-American criminals have been victimizing neighborhoods in Santa Ana by operating illegal gambling halls that also draw guns and drugs to the community.

Santa Ana PD has launched a campaign to shut down the criminal activity, remaining aggressive in defense of the community they serve while keeping use of force to a minimum.

That’s a compelling local story even before you consider its circumstances fly in the face of the current conventional perceptions of much of the media, which too often paints Asians as one-dimensional victims of hateful racism and too readily portrays cops as villains of civic life in America.

Today’s journalists might even note that a story involving a group of Asian-Americans running a crime ring and a well-measured response by the cops amounts to a 2021 version of a “man-bites-dog story.”

That’s a phrase that describes a story that is newsworthy precisely because it flies in the face of conventional perceptions.

But it looks as though that dog won’t hunt with much of today’s media.

* * *

Consider Voice of OC’s more recent coverage of the racial reckoning in regard to the Vietnamese-American community in Santa Ana:

“… the new fiscal year budget finally sets the city on the path toward hiring its first Vietnamese community liaison to serve an estimated 25,000 Vietnamese American residents,” the outlet reported on June 7, apparently unaware of the bias it displays by using the word “finally” in that sentence.

The story went on to report that “Councilmember Thai Viet Phan pushed the liaison idea,” and has “repeatedly demanded City Hall include the initiative in their spending outlook over the last several months, especially amid a nationwide rise in Anti-Asian racism and historically low participation by the community in Santa Ana’s civic affairs.”

Here’s another way to look at life in Santa Ana: A crime ring of Vietnamese-Americans that gets protection for an illegal business through a bribe of a local police officer is, in fact, involved at the very core of civic affairs.

* * *

It’s only fair, however, to note that we’re not talking about Asian criminals—they’re criminals who happen to be Asian.

And they don’t represent the Vietnamese-American community in Orange County—they’re outliers as well as outlaws.

That’s the imperfect, incomplete and honest first draft of this particular page of history.

There’s room for more of the same from other journalists and perspectives—and reason to leave the revising to historians.

Jerry Sullivan is chief columnist of SullivanSaysSoCal.com.

You can follow him @SullivanSaysSC

Photo credit: Ken Lund via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Coming Collapse of the Developing World

Joel Kotkin and Hugo Kruger — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

In Europe, North America, Oceania and East Asia, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a tragic, wrenching experience, creating more depressed and divided societies. Yet, as we have been gazing obsessively at our own problems, a spectre infinitely worse is emerging in the most populous, fastest growing and least resilient parts of the world.

Covid has caused a deep crisis in the already suffering developing world, which contains nearly half of all humanity. And this will have serious implications for the future of the world economy and political order.

Initially, Covid was something of a rich country’s disease. It started in industrial China and spread to places like the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom. But now none of the wealthiest countries falls within the top 10 worst-hit countries in terms of Covid deaths per capita. In the US, Covid has gone from the leading cause of death to seventh place in just over a year.

According to Bloomberg, the countries now most resilient to Covid and its variants are all among the richest – the United States, New Zealand, Israel, France, the UK and Spain, along with some wealthier East Asian countries, including China. In contrast, the pandemic rages on in Latin America and the backwaters of Eastern Europe. Impoverished Peru has been particularly hard hit, recording a Covid fatality rate twice that of any other country.

At the bottom of the list, according to Bloomberg, lies Argentina, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Colombia and Pakistan, where on average just five per cent of the population have been vaccinated. We may be seeing the fruits of what the Nation describes as ‘a gargantuan north-south vaccination gap’.

A vaccine apartheid

By June this year, the US and Britain had jabbed half of their populations, and the rest of the EU had jabbed a third. In contrast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, North Sudan, Vietnam and Zambia had vaccinated between 0.1 per cent and 0.9 per cent of their populations. This is a world lurching towards vaccine apartheid.

Indeed, given the fear Covid-19 instils in people, developing countries in which infections are rife could become like no-go areas for Westerners – places that Western businesses avoid, except to acquire raw materials, such as the minerals that are critical to meeting the climate goals of Western countries.

Even before the pandemic, many economies in the developing world were experiencing difficulty accessing world credit markets, and that access will likely now worsen. Vaccination apartheid will exacerbate pre-existing problems. For example, according to 2019 data from the World Bank, youth unemployment was approaching 25 per cent in Turkey, India and Iran. In South Africa, it was over 55 per cent. Already high levels of youth unemployment will become much higher.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

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.

Hügo Krüger is a Structural Engineer with working experience in the Nuclear, Concrete and Oil and Gas Industry. He was born in Pretoria South Africa and moved to France in 2015. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Pretoria and a Masters degree in Nuclear Structures from the École spéciale des travaux publics, du bâtiment et de l'industrie (ESTP Paris). He frequently contributes to the South African English blog Rational Standard and the Afrikaans Newspaper Rapport. He fluently speaks French, Germany, English and Afrikaans. His interests include politics, economics, public policy, history, languages, Krav Maga and Structural Engineering.

Photo: Dennis Jarvis, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Millennials Are a Lot Less Progressive Than You Think

Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Millennials have long been cast as the great progressive hope, or "New Progressive America: The Millennial Generation," as one study would have it. 25- to 40-year-old Americans, already the largest portion of the current adult population, have been cast by progressives as "a hero generation" that will escape the material trappings of their Boomer parents' suburban lives and pull American politics far to the Left.

To be sure, millennials are the most Democratic-leaning of generations, as the Pew Research Center found; they have close to a 60 percent fealty to Democrats, and their votes clearly helped get rid of Donald Trump. So it's fitting that their avatar is the congressional "Squad" led by the ubiquitous 30-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of their own.

It's also undeniable that the ideological cast of millennials, who will be the largest voting block by 2024, will shape our political future. But a closer look at millennial attitudes suggests that the difference between their lives and the lives of their parents is not always by design, and that given the choice, many millennials would prefer to be parents and enjoy family life in the suburbs (and the attendant centrist politics) than be the "heroes" of a left-wing movement.

You can see this in the fact that millennials have been increasingly leaving big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for more conventional locales, as an analysis of the past decade found. Millennials have spent the past 10 years moving en masse to less expensive, redder metros in the Sunbelt and to the suburbs and exurbs of select Midwestern cities like Columbus, Des Moines and Indianapolis.

Millennials just aren't the overwhelmingly enthusiastic urbanites that people say they are; big skies and small towns are in high demand for a significant number of younger Americans. Some 26 percent told researchers they would like to end up in small-town or rural America, while another 39 percent are headed for the suburbs. This even applies to better educated workers, nearly 70 percent of whom prefer suburban or small-town living. This pattern is strongest among whites and Latinos, but even among African Americans, roughly half opt for suburban living.

And this desire to leave cities is correlated strongly with marital status. Almost a third of married millennials want to move out to the country—compared to 21 percent of singles. It reflects a political divide between primarily childless, left-leaning urbanites and more conservative or centrist families on the periphery.

Reflecting their geographic diversity, millennials are also proving less uniformly Left than imagined, as Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist, found; as they age and start families, millennials tend to focus more on economic improvement than abstract notions of cultural or social justice.

A poll of over 1,400 people sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and Reality Check Insights after the November 2020 elections revealed that a plurality of millennials consider themselves centrists. 50 percent are politically independent or lean only a bit in one direction, while another 16 percent are conservative. Just a third identify as liberal.

Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: picjumbo via Pexels.

International Traffic Congestion Extinguished by Pandemic and Remote Work

Wendell Cox — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The 2020 TomTom Traffic Index reflects a huge drop in worldwide urban traffic congestion levels. Congestion levels (rated by the percentage of additional time required for auto travel during “rush hour”) dropped in 387 urban areas while increasing in only 13. Overall, TomTom rates 416 urban areas in 57 international geographies. The TomTom Traffic Index is produced by TomTom International BV. TomTom is known for its satellite navigation services for drivers and maps.

According to TomTom, “The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way we live, work and move. Lockdowns, remote working and other restrictions on movement have transformed patterns of movement and reduced traffic congestion in most cities.” Similar results were just reported for many more US urban areas in Record Low Congestion Levels in Seattle, LA & San Francisco: The 2020 Urban Mobility Report, with congestion down by about 50% and greenhouse gas emissions from commuting also down 50%.

TomTom reports that: “This year we witnessed a mass exodus of people from capital cities across Europe. The day before new lockdowns went into force was the most congested day in Athens and London in 2020. Meanwhile in Paris, traffic jams reached record lengths,” where a congestion level of 142% was recorded. This an incredibly high traffic congestion index --- 2.6 times the highest annual congestion level recorded in the most congested urban area (Moscow, at 54%, below) and 4.4 times the Paris 2020 congestion level (Paris had the 42nd highest congestion index out of the 416 urban areas).

Congestion Levels by Nation

The TomTom Traffic Index provides congestion levels for 10 or more urban areas in eight nations (including the European Union).

The United States has the lowest congestion level, at an average of 13.8% (Figure 1). This is not surprising, given the comparatively low densities of US urban areas (Demographia World Urban Areas, Schedule 1, Page 19) and the unparalleled dispersion of employment and the fairly comprehensive limited access expressway system. Canada ranks second, at 17.3%, despite having urban population densities double that of the US, and more limited expressways. Australia has the third best congestion level at 20.2%. The United Kingdom, the European Union and China are bunched from fourth to sixth, within 0.7% of one another. Turkey’s congestion level is at 26.7% while Russia has by far the highest congestion level, at 36.6%.

Congestion Levels by Urban Area Population

As would be expected, the worst congestion levels are in the largest urban areas (over 5,000,000), at 28.9% (Figure 2). The 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 category has a congestion level of 22.5%, The smallest category (under 1,000,000) has a congestion level of 18.5%. Overall, the average congestion level is 21.2% (urban area population categories are based on data from Demographia World Urban Areas).

The highest and lowest congestion levels are reviewed below, by population category.

Urban Areas Over 5,000,000 Population

Because of ties (urban areas with the same congestion level), 13 urban areas have top ten congestion levels in the largest population category (5,000,000+ population), seven of which are in the United States and four are in China.

The lowest congestion levels were in Dallas-Fort Worth (USA) and Dongguan, China, both at 13% (Figure 3). Dallas-Fort Worth had the lowest congestion level in this population category at least twice before (2017 and 2015). Dongguan is a Pearl River Delta urban area of about 8 million residents, located between two much larger urban areas, Guangzhou-Foshan and Shenzhen.

Rio de Janeiro had the third least congestion, while Madrid and Boston tied for the fourth position. There was a three way tie for 6th place between Suzhou (Jiangsu, China), Houston and Wuhan. Quanzhou (Fuzhou, China), Atlanta, Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia made a five way tie for 10th best congestion level. Quanzhou may be China’s most decentralized urban area, with its “in situ” urbanization (urbanization in place, rather than by expansion from a core) that involves conversion of rural areas in place to urban areas, with agricultural employment being replaced by non-agricultural employment).

The highest congestion levels in the 5,000,000+ population category included six of the highest density urban areas in the world: Bogota, Manila, Bangalore, Delhi, Lima and Pune (all with more than 25,000 per square mile or 10,000 per square kilometer). By comparison, the average world urban area with more than 500,000 population is 10,800 per square mile or 4,200 per square kilometer.

The highest congestion level was in Moscow, at 54% (Figure 4). The next three, Mumbai, Bogota and Manila were in a three way tie for third worst congestion. Each of these three urban areas is very high density, at over 30,000 per square mile (over 12,000 per square kilometer). Istanbul and Bengaluru (Bangalore), India shared the 6th highest congestion levels. Delhi, the world’s third largest urban area had the seventh highest congestion level. Bangkok and St. Petersburg shared 8th position. There was a three way tie for 9th, which included Lima, Pune (India) and Chongqing (China).

Urban Areas 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 Population

There are 12 urban areas with top ten congestion levels in the 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 population category), 11 of which are in the United States and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

There was a seven way tie between US urban areas for the lowest traffic congestion level (9%) — St. Louis, Cleveland, Richmond, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Kansas City. Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) took 8th place. There was a four way tie at 9th place between Louisville, Memphis, Columbus and Detroit (Figure 5).

There are 11 urban areas with the highest congestion levels in the 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 population category. Four are in Ukraine and two are in Russia.

The worst congestion was in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, at 51%, a higher congestion level than all but six other urban areas of any size (Figure 6), despite a population of less than 3,000,000. Number two Novosibersk (Russia) has an even smaller population, below 2,000,000, but has a congestion level that ranks 9th highest out of the 416 urban areas. Ukraine’s Odessa and Kharkiv rank third and fourth, while Bucharest (Romania) ranks fifth, just ahead of Samara, Russia. Dublin and Dnipro (Ukraine) tied for seventh, followed by a three-way tie for 9th, consisting of Recife (Brazil), Tel Aviv and Changchun (Jilin, China).

Urban Areas Under 1,000,000 Population

There are 14 urban areas with top ten congestion levels in the under 1,000,000 population category, 12 of which are in the United States, along with Cadiz, Spain and Amere in the Netherlands.

Greensboro-High Point (US) had the lowest congestion level, at 7%. A six way tie for second place included Cadiz, Dayton, Little Rock, Akron, Syracuse and Winston-Salem. Worcester (MA) took 8thplace. There was an 8 way tie for 9th place including Buffalo, Albany, Columbia (SC), Omaha, Knoxville, Grand Rapids and Rochester, and Amere (Figure 7).

Among the 13 urban areas with the highest congestion levels in the under 1,000,000 category, five are in Poland. All of the others are in European nations.

The highest congestion level was in Lodz, Poland, at 42%, which was followed by two other Polish urban areas, Krakow and Wroclaw. Edinburgh was fourth, followed by another Polish urban area, Poznan. Sofia, Bulgaria had the sixth worst congestion level, while Palermo (Italy), Gdansk (Poland) and Geneva shared 7th place. Tomsk (Russia), Brighton and Hove, and Hull (United Kingdom) and Limerick (Ireland) were in a four way tie for 9th place (Figure 8).

Changing Traffic Forever?

As has been evident in international traffic congestion indexes before, the United States has dominated low congestion levels. Thirty of the 39 urban areas with top 10 congestion levels were in the United States. China had six of the top 39 urban areas with the lowest congestion levels.

TomTom suggests that “COVID-19 could change traffic forever” and imagines a future more based on remote work, in which “We'll no longer waste hours stuck in traffic as working from home will became the norm for most jobs. Rush hour traffic will all but disappear, making journeys faster and less stressful.” This more environmentally friendly future, with its more enriching lives could well be achievable.

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 Dallas, Dallas-Fort Worth urban area: Tied with Dongguan (China) for lowest congestion level in 2020 TomTom Traffic Index (by author).

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.

The New Labor Crisis in the Biggest Opportunity in a Generation

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The COVID-19 pandemic has left pain and tragedy in its wake. But it has also created a unique opportunity to address the country's persistent class divides, thanks to a persistent lack of labor resulting from the pandemic. In a world economy that has seen labor's share of income drop for generations, this labor shortage could provide some restored leverage for both white and blue collar workers.

The labor shortage was a reversal from the earlier impact of the pandemic on labor. Initially, COVID-19 devastated the working class and parts of the private sector middle class; the harsh lockdowns imposed in many places caused upwards of one third of small businesses to close down permanently and decimated the service industry.

But as the economy has recovered, despite high unemployment over 6 percent and over 8 million fewer positions, there's a shortage of workers, including 7.4 million unfilled jobs. And it's not relegated to any one industry. Companies like John Deere, its order book strong due to a worldwide surge in commodity prices, are struggling to find workers willing to take jobs in its Iowa factories, a phenomenon common across the industrial economy. We're seeing a massive shortage of virtually every kind of labor, including blue collar jobs. What this means is that companies have to work harder to attract workers; even fast-food restaurants like McDonald's are offering low end service workers signing bonuses, higher wages and more humane working conditions.

And the blue-collar jobs gusher could just be beginning. Arvind Kaushal, leader of the manufacturing practice at Booz & Company, has estimated that as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs cannot be filled. The current shortage of welders alone is expected to grow to 400,000 by 2024. Much the same can be said about logistics, which basically kept the country running amidst the pandemic lockdowns: A shortage of tanker drivers threatens gas deliveries this summer. The shortfall is now so severe that Amazon has set up its own incubator for new trucking companies.

Moreover, the shift to work from home that the pandemic birthed represents a huge opportunity for white collar workers. Once dragooned into offices far from affordable homes, many office workers have embraced new hybrid models, working remotely not only from home but from dispersed offices and coffee shops. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom has suggested at least 20 percent of the workforce will work remotely even after the pandemic ends, up from 5.7 percent in 2019. And there's evidence that remote workers have been more productive, with many executives surprisingly pleased with the results.

Besides surprising productivity gains registered during the pandemic, many workers are creating an enhanced "life-work balance" thanks to remote working. This is critical to millennials and women with children trying to get back into the labor force once schools reopen. And they're not willing to give it up now that the pandemic is over; in a recent survey of over 5,000 employed adults, four in 10 American workers expected some level of remote work flexibility post-pandemic.

Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.

Photo: Marco Verch via Marco Verch website under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Housing Psychographics

John Sanphillippo — Sat, 03 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Last week I got a call from young friends who wanted my opinion on whether or not to buy a particular house. It was a simple two bedroom one bath 943 square foot (87 square meter) cottage that was built in 1895. The location was in a fashionable small semi rural town in Sonoma north of San Francisco. It was on the market for $600,000. I said I couldn’t make that choice for them, but I could give them my interpretation of the pros and cons.

I started by asking them if they could reasonably afford the house. They said they could pull together a 10% down payment, take on PMI (mortgage insurance for less than a 20% down payment) and their monthly mortgage would be about the same as their current rent. They were comfortable with those numbers.

Then they sent me the official inspection report. The roof was well past its expiration date with active leaks. The electrical and plumbing systems had various code violations and required health and safety upgrades. There was dry rot. There were termites. The water heater and furnace were at the end of their life cycles. The windows and doors didn’t function properly. There was lead contamination. The list went on.

I told them that I’ve bought several homes over the decades that were in similar condition. All these things could be fixed. It’s just a matter of time and money. I personally love tinkering with old houses even with all the inevitable complications and unpleasant surprises. I find great pleasure in renovating and gardening and I’ve done well financially as an accidental side effect. I also like owning real tangible physical things that will keep me warm, dry, and fed. But that’s just me.

Then I explained that back in 2010 in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis I almost bought a very similar house directly across the street. I dug up my old photos. I’m a big fan of buying the worst house in a premium location at the bottom of an economic cycle. I ended up buying a different house instead, but looking back I would have been happy if I had chosen this place. It sold for $179,000 so if I had bought it I probably would have made a lot of money even if I didn’t do much improving. The value of the dirt under the house has risen tremendously in the last decade and the Covid surge only pushed up values even higher.

That brought us to the question of market conditions. Will property values continue to rise forever? Or are we in another bubble right now? I don’t know. No one does. It’s all a mystery. You pay your dollar and you take your chances.

Read the rest of this piece on Granola Shotgun.

Johnny Sanphillippo is an amateur architecture buff with a passionate interest in where and how we all live and occupy the landscape, from small rural towns to skyscrapers and everything in between. He travels often, conducts interviews with people of interest, and gathers photos and video of places worth talking about (which he often shares on Strong Towns). Johnny writes for Strong Towns, and his blog, Granola Shotgun.