Cocoposts

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. 

TIDD Hugs and Understanding

The vote to amend the City of Albuquerque's ordinance regarding tax increment financing failed 5-4 last night.    Proponents for the changes were clear.   In short they said, you should understand consequences before you embrace something wholeheartedly. 

Councilor Cadigan spoke of baseball, failed promises of the railroad builders and the meaning of the  anti-donation clause in the New Mexico Constitution.  Councilor O'Malley described life, planning and TIDDs in all their fractal animal-print complexity.  Along with Benton and Garduno, they demonstrated understanding of the risks and rewards of  TIDD financing.

Opponents didn't say anything that even registered on the common-sense o-meter.  They have unquestioningly embraced the whole idea.  Curiously, Councilor Sally Mayer talked about her intelligence getting insulted and  Councilor Trudy Jones picked up this.  Ken Sanchez talked about how the City might get sued.   Chamber of Commerce, Homebuilders and NAIOP spoke against the bill and evoked the magic word -  jobs. 

A great piece from Planning and Environmental Law by Greg LeRoy about TIF is here.  New Mexico Voices for Children has good stuff here. 

From the LeRoy article:

How much is enough?  The U.S. is arguably well overbuilt in retail space, some of it subsidized by TIF.  The National Trust for Historic Preservation estimates the nation has 38 square feet of store space per capita, compared to other industrialized nations with between 1.5 and eight square feet (and eight square feet in the U.S. 30 years ago).

A 2001 study by the Congress for the New Urbanism and PriceWaterhouseCoopers about "grayfields"--the euphemism for dead malls--found that 7 percent of regional malls were already grayfields and another 12 percent were "potentially moving towards grayfield status in the next five years"; that would be 389 dead malls.

   

Rust, Sun, New Urbanists

Title of James Howard Kunstler's excellent post this week contrasting Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania with Austin, Texas: Rust and Sun. 

In Austin -where he attended the conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism:

The convention center itself was a thing built to such a pharoanic scale that Rameses the Great might have commissioned it for his villa in Easthampton. It was a quarter-mile walk from the front of the ballroom to the coffee set-up in the rear -- and this was one of the smaller ballrooms. The larger ones were occupied by some kind of intramural sports association convention full of people wearing sideways hats and weird, calf-length athletic shorts. The Sunbelt is all about sports, where the social aggression seething below the surface has been channeled.

All this was hardly the fault of the New Urbanists, who came there mostly to look and learn, and continue the process of refining their agenda for the years ahead. More and more they are coming to recognize the discontinuities we face in the form of peak oil and climate change. On these points, the leadership may be even more radically active than the membership. The ideas from meetings they held in Austin about how to meet these problems will continue to radiate through the country. 

They are probably the only group of professionals in America that I know of -- including the professional environmentalists -- who have a coherent vision of how America might physically arrange daily life in the terrible aftermath of the fossil fuel fiasco. Their ideas have the power to galvanize our otherwise lame political debates of the season. Nobody else in America is really thinking about what we'll do when the cardboard signs appear on the convenience store pump racks saying "out of gas...."

Another Authority

From the Albuquerque Journal - an idea for a city-county redevelopment authority to which my gut reaction is so negative that I struggle to read the entire story as I was shaking my head so hard.  Can we please call it something else?   I'm so wary of authority.

O'Malley has introduced legislation to organize a "work group" to study the issue and report on the viability of creating an authority.  If the idea proves to be sound, the same group would offer recommendations on how the authority should be set up, who would be involved and how much autonomy it should have.  O'Malley said the city's redevelopment office was not efficient enough to ensure continuous progress on larger redevelopments and that it is vulnerable to political pressures. ...

A new board is no less vulnerable to political pressure, IMHO.    

 

Mayor Martin Chávez said he would take a look at the idea but won't take a position until there's more information.  He said he would not support "anything that circumscribes the authority of those that are accountable to the public."

That's an interesting comment.  More likely, a new board circumscribes accountability, while the authority of the individual who sits on such a board may actually increase.  His accountability to the public is generally reduced by new decision-making machinations and another set of poorly attended meetings.  New boards are less transparent to public scrutiny,  and certainly no less vulnerable to politics. 

Here's a link to Denver's redevelopment authority.  Not too exciting but apparently functional. 

 

DOT Public-Private Partnership

 From the Albuquerque Journal

The Governor's Office issued a scathing review Thursday of the Transportation Department's effort to redevelop its headquarters and district offices in Santa Fe, calling it a "fatally flawed process." ...

Gov. Bill Richardson halted DOT's plans for a private firm headed by Santa Fe art dealer Gerald Peters to develop $350 million to $400 million in office space, housing, a commuter train station and commercial and retail property on the headquarters land downtown. ...

"While there may have been a conspiracy to defraud private developers involved in these projects, there is no evidence that any kickbacks or illegal payments were achieved," the Governor's Office said.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Defraud private developers?  What about bilking public projects?  How are private  developers even potential victims?  It takes two to tango. 

The Governor's office left the door of la sala wide open:

We need to go back to the drawing board on this," said James Jimenez, the governor's chief of staff. He added, "I still think that whole private-public partnership makes sense."

It never made sense in the first place.  How can it still make sense?

Oh,  just relax and listen to the music.  Hear a tango?

 

Villa Muse

Austin American-Statesman covers an interesting development with development.   

There was a deal being worked to enable a project in eastern Travis County - within Austin's ETZ - extraterritorial area.*    Called Villa Muse, the project developers demanded it be exempt from Austin's  planning and development requirements. 

No Go.  Austin's City Council declined.  Now the developer is taking his toys and stomping away from Austin's "regulatory grasp".   

The backers of a proposed entertainment studio and production facility in eastern Travis County say they are negotiating with other Texas cities to move the project after Austin officials refused to temporarily release the project from its regulatory grasp.

Villa Muse Vice President Paul Alvarado-Dykstra would not reveal which other cities the developers are negotiating with but said there was more than one and all were in Texas.

"We haven't closed the door on Austin, but we kind of feel like Austin closed the door on us last Thursday," he said. ...

The council voted to try to find a way to reach a development agreement within the city's future growth boundaries, but Alvarado-Dykstra said the developers are not interested in pursuing such a deal.

City and state officials say Austin's film industry has been losing jobs in recent years to nearby states with better incentives and facilities.

...and maybe fewer rules than Texas!    

*  You remember "extraterritorial" areas?   Well, Texas still has 'em.  Our legislature, inspired by the development lobby, eliminated Albuquerque's extraterritorial powers the same year they kneecapped annexation and kidnapped the water utility.   

South Valley Incorporation

The Journal provides a  presumptive headline stating that South Valley incorporation is moving ahead because Representative Miguel Garcia got more funding and contracted for some analysis.  Paperwork will be drafted.  Passionate people will repeat half-truths one both sides.  It will move ahead.      

Mike Ciesielski, a South Valley resident and a member of an advisory committee working with Garcia on incorporation issues, said the South Valley should have the power to determine issues such as education, planning and public safety.  "Two words: self- governance," Ciesielski said. "We want the legitimate authority that goes along with a municipality to determine what we're going to look like."

Two words: Good Luck. 

Legitimate authority is a funny term, especially used in context with what things will look like.  Somebody should disavow proponents of this notion right away.  Incorporation is no magic planning pill or solution to corrupt or apathetic leadership.  And let's start talking costs, not just tax base.   

Besides getting people riled up, this may be effective in getting some good questions asked about costs.  Good questions about public service costs were what caused the sh*tstorm over the Planned Growth Strategy.   The numbers were  big and some don't like hearing them. 

And the existing governments that incorporation proponents don't think much of, won't go away.  The layers are additive.  Most of the services that already exist will require contracting or purchase. That can get ugly.

Fragmented, self-interested, multiple local governments are out-sized by regional issues.   Developers outsize governments.  Parochialism kills planning.  Poof.   

 

Current Settlement Patterns

Excellent excerpt from Ezra Klein - American Prospect on density and How We Live Now:

There's often a tendency to assume that the status quo is the most "natural" way for things to be, and that rejiggering the relevant subsidies is somehow more artificial and presumptuous. But the current system was built atop a massive structure of subsidies and tax breaks. The mortgage tax deduction advantaged bigger homes; funding schools through inequitable property taxes encouraged families to move out of cities where the property taxes were low and into richer suburbs where the schools would be wealthy; putting billions into costly and little-used roads made far-flung developments appear cheap to those who only saw the finished product; underfunding public transportation heavily influenced development patterns, and so on and so forth. And that doesn't even get into the racial unrest, social dysfunction, and crime levels that helped drive white flight -- and thus sprawl -- in the 60s and 70s.

Indeed, there's nothing natural about our current settlement patterns, and no reason preserving them should be seen as a nod to expressed preference rather than, as it actually is, a status quo bias in favor of the current subsidies and their associated winners. Nobody's saying we should make suburbs illegal. But we don't have to abide by public policy that makes them look far cheaper and more economical than they are.

After this nail-head hitting, a chorus of whining erupts in the comments.  The predictable responses include how density kills, planning sucks and New Urbanism will never work because there is no space for the Hummers.    

My favorite is the Bad Neighbor argument for sprawl.  "Ezra, you've never had a really bad neighbor, have you? One that drove you from your residence?"      I can't help but picture this unhappy critic in his college dorm room.