Cocoposts

Tesla's Waterline

Sean Olson in the Albuquerque Journal describes the fate of the taxpayer funded waterline that was to have served the new Tesla flying electric carpet plant.  Now that Tesla isn't coming, you'd think there wouldn't be a line.  Wrongo. 

See, the water line is more important to local fortunes than Tesla.  Just like the public infrastructure extended to the westside Eclipse site, that they will never occupy, was more important than Eclipse.   

Land values - its about the land values. 

Sean gets through the whole story without mentioning the elephant and the 800 pound gorilla in the room.  Dancing.    A lot of people in this little burg have their nut in speculative real estate and at least one of them is a County Commissioner (Hint: the one that drives a Bentley and owns the Tesla site).  I guess because he doesn't happen to sit on the Authority board right now, this doesn't need mentioning.  Except it really does need mentioning.

The leaders assure us that it is all a good thing.  Other companies will come along and policies will protect us from the sprawl development that will want to hook into the line.  Like that's worked before. 

I think they expect us not to notice we've been had. 

That means there will be no service to homes in a SunCal development beyond those zones until growth on the West Side catches up to or reaches the SunCal development.  Businesses, on the other hand, would have immediate access to the water if SunCal builds the water and sewer lines ....

What happens if neither one occurs? 

Oh, don't be so doomy gloomy!

Land Don't Move

Albuquerque is not running out of land. We are running out of money, water and oil but not land.  Land is still there.  Same land the Indians grew corn on and Spanish herded sheep over. Just look down. Land don't move.

It can be consumed and racked by bulldozers and building, the soil poisoned or paved over, but the place will still exist. And the people in place now may either love it and not plan to leave, or own it and don't want to sell it at a loss.

But there is a popular assumption that developers will go elsewhere if they can't get what they want.  They will stamp their expensive shoes on marble and, essentially, threaten to move all that SunCal land to Valencia County if they don't get TIDD's.

The slowed economy and the long emergency are hard news for land flippers who have enjoyed the housing boom and status quo.  They will try whatever they can to make the bottom line, including arguing that remaining regulations, like impact fees, are burdensome. 

Planning - Not Just for Commies!

Willamette Week notes that Portland is updating their long range plan.  An excerpt:

"How do the last big Portland plans—from 1972 and 1988—hold up? Pretty well, considering all that can change over decades. Aside from grumps like Cato Institute fellow Randal O’Toole, who believes “government planning always fails,” most consider Portland’s planners some of the best. But here’s where their crystal balls fell short:

1972

On TV: Fat Albert, Munich Olympics

Typical plan sentence: “Automobile traffic is noisy, smelly, and dangerous.”

Grade: B. Ambitious and concise. Hostile to cars and tall buildings.

GOALS:

• “Keep the Willamette River free of pollution.”
2008) River still full of shit. Fish still full of PCBs and mercury.

• “Reinforce the Oriental restaurant concentration along NW Fourth Avenue with additional entertainment facilities.”
2008) Are strip clubs “entertainment facilities”?

• Calls for major emphasis on public transit, and downtown “traffic-free” districts where private car traffic and on-street parking are “eliminated.”
2008) Cars are banned…during parades. This year’s Plan drafters call the transportation goals of 1972 “unrealistic.” Transit ridership is 50 percent lower than the 1972 goal.

1988

On TV: Matlock, Iran-Contra

Typical plan sentence: “These are aspirations for greatness, aspirations that, if adhered to, can be achieved. This is how great cities come into being.”

Grade: C. Less ambitious yet more grandiose. Made peace with cars and development.

GOALS:

• “Establish a World’s Fair committee.”
2008) Still time to bid for the 2020 Olympics.

• “Recognize that parking is an important element in the transportation system.”
2008) So much for 1972’s going “traffic-free.”

• “Provide year-round shelter for the homeless.”
2008) No—but we’ve got a 10-Year Plan for that, too.

• Develop “public restroom facilities such as pissoirs.”
2008) Not yet—but you can pee in City Hall after dark.

• Study “alternative fuels for transit.”
2008) TriMet still burns diesel. Some gas stations pump biofuels.

• Build a public aquarium as a major attraction.
2008) Go, Fish.

• Promote the growth of the brewing and distilling industries.
2008) Portland has 30 breweries—more than any city anywhere. Cheers!"

(Thanks for the link John Hooker.)

The Thing

The thing about planning is ... a short post for NMFBIHOP where I agreed to write weekly for some obscure  reason related to how I work so much better with supervision. 

A Public Housing Crisis

From the Houston Chronicle as reprinted from the Wasington Post, Mickael Kelly, Executive Director of the Washington DC Housing Authority:

Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has tried to cripple public housing. It has devalued and defunded key programs. The president's proposed 2009 budget includes massive cuts in affordable-housing programs that will hit the working poor, people with disabilities and seniors while dismantling the crowning achievement of federal efforts to revitalize and redevelop city neighborhoods.

This year, for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed operating subsidies equal to just 81 percent of what the agency itself determined are needed. This is equivalent to saying that state and local housing authorities should shutter nearly one fifth, or 227,000, of their units nationwide. What happens in such situations? Authorities do not evict the poor but are forced to reduce services to residents and to delay or neglect repairs and maintenance, which in turn causes public housing units to become run-down. Budgeting shortfalls feed a vicious cycle.

Urban housing and rental subsidies and programs are underfunded and investment is shifted to the suburban fringe.   Homeownership is pushed as a sacred value for Americans.  

In New Mexico the Legislature has generously funded programs for building new "affordable" housing and developers can do sweet financing deals to build the same old suburban stuff  - just a little cheaper.  

A far cry from DC public housing?  Maybe.  But the same racket as sprawl.  

Sprawl Snark South

A recent Duke City Fix post asks the interesting questions:   

1. Should Albuquerque spread south?
2. Should it stay moving west (sic)?

Does it really matter what we think?  Albuquerque grows in spite of such thoughtful questions.   Discussions of the broader public interest are easily co-opted and misdirect us from the specifics - like who owns the land, finances the projects and stands to profit. 

Snarkity snark snark snark.

Sprawl Sampler

This San Francisco Chronicle story from April 18, 2008, "Creeping Sprawl",  and the comments that follow it, nearly capture the complete sprawling picture of growth in California and elsewhere.

 "We're losing migration corridors for animals and compromising our watersheds and paving over productive farmland," said Amanda Brown-Stevens, field director for Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area land conservation and urban planning organization.

 The challenge, she said, is getting people to value long-term sustainability more than short-term profit. If they won't do it on their own, then land-use laws can be enacted to prevent landowners and builders from developing open space.

It may be a little too little and too late for more land-use laws.  Been there and done that.

What few note is that sprawl is built with borrowed money.   Most blame either developers, planners or government politicians for the last twenty-five years of bad development, we should be blaming Wall Street.   

APS Building Spree

 Albuquerque Journal notes APS construction. 

The rapid-fire construction of West Side schools continued Wednesday as officials broke ground on a middle school next to Volcano Vista High.  "We're going clear to the Rio Puerco," Albuquerque School Board President Mary Lee Martin said, noting the western expansion of the district in the past several years....

In the next three years, APS plans to open 10 new schools...

Giddy-up for sprawl-enabling schools clear to the Puerco!   Catching up with the west side real estate growth just in time for a slow-down.

This is the Way Cities Die

American Airlines to pull out of Oakland International, headline San Francisco Chronicle. 

05-05) 21:07 PDT Oakland -- American Airlines, citing the high cost of fuel, will pull out of Oakland International Airport in September after six decades operating there, airport officials said Monday.

The airline has been running three daily non-stop flights out of the airport to Dallas-Ft. Worth and has been operating at Oakland since 1947.

Reading and republishing the comments of those with whom you agree saves the trouble of writing and leaves more time for lurking.  Commenter Pulpwood places this news in a much much larger context. 

This is the way that cities die. Incompetent corrupt politicians pandering to howling mobs of special interests with nothing to contribute but votes to reelect the politicians. Gary, Indiana. Cleveland, Ohio. Buffalo, New York. Oakland, California. 80 years ago flourishing downtowns, working electric transit systems, civic pride, beautiful carefully built ornate buildings, gardens, trees. Each generation never knows what preceded it. No one is aware of the decline. Like the environment collapsing. One by one, social customs fade, a species disappears. Another neighborhood goes, what propels it forward is a mere reworking of the past. It's not the place, it's the new people and the people that manipulate them and that profit from them that makes a city die.

Pulpwood sounds like a cynical city planner in need of a double Buckaroo Bonsai. 

And some rail service. 

Blaming Smart Growth

In a mighty leap of logic and misdirection, not unusual for the Heritage Foundation, author Wendell Cox blames smart growth for the housing bubble, economic downturn and alopecia.       

These policies, often referred to as "smart growth," create a scarcity of land, artificially raise the price of housing, and, again, have increased the exposure of the market to risky mortgage debt. When more liberal loan policies were implemented, metropolitan areas that had adopted these more restrictive policies lacked the resilient land markets that would have allowed the greater demand to be accommodated without inordinate increases in house prices.

This is simultaneously ridiculous and boring - other typifying traits of  HF material.

There is a glut of housing tied directly to those  liberal loan policies, not a shortage of land caused by excessive land use regulation.  And we should be so lucky.  The sprawl pattern paradigm of the last twenty-five years was constrained by very little and the least of these was "smart growth" regulation.   The term itself was only more recently popularized to describe the largely ineffective and pathetic attempts to rein in the juggernaut - like Albuquerque's Planned Growth Strategy in 1996 - the potential of which was nipped in the bud by sprawlmeisters.   

Albuquerque's most obvious development constraint is land ownership, not regulation.  The edges of our ubiquitous suburbia are defined by federal, Indian or old land grant boundaries, not smart growth boundaries.  The entire idea of effective growth boundaries was kneecapped by the very developer friendly Legislature early in the decade.

Blaming planning or local government regulation seems popular with those who made record breaking profits in the housing boom and on the way down they are grasping at straws.