Regional planning

A Recipe for Decline 0
- November 29, 2011
Thanks to high housing prices and a poor economy (which is also partly due to high housing prices), more Americans are leaving California than are moving to the state. In the last decade, 1.5 million more people moved out than moved in from other states, and the poor economy is also reducing foreign immigration, leaving […]
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New Concept: Compare Benefits with Costs 0
- November 23, 2011
The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is considering the possibility of using benefit-cost analyses to decide how to spend federal and state taxpayer dollars. This “new” technology dates back to 1848, so you can see why regional planners might be just discovering it now. As presented in the San Jose Mercury-News, benefit-cost […]
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Meeting with a Regional Planner 0
- November 10, 2011
An Aussie who calls himself the Unconventional Economist, also known as Leith van Onselen, created and posted this little cartoon about dealing with regional planners. He based much of it on a script by another blogger named Ross Elliot. Admittedly, some of the statements made by the planner in the animation are a bit far […]
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Inside the Consulting World 0
- October 10, 2011
Last Saturday the Antiplanner participated in a conference about the Columbia River Crossing, a government-planning effort aimed at replacing a bridge that doesn’t need to be replaced so Portland can sneak its light-rail system (and associated land-use planning) into Vancouver, Washington. One of the more fascinating presentations at the conference came from Tiffany Couch, a […]
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Remembering Jane Jacobs 0
- October 7, 2011
An article in The American Conservative commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The publication also asked the Antiplanner to join a number of New Urbanists and others in an on-line seminar about the influence of Jacobs on American cities. The Antiplanner’s response was that “Jacobs was […]
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The Density Fallacy 0
- October 5, 2011
A decade or so ago, an Economist senior editor named Frances Cairncross wrote a book called The Death of Distance which argued that, thanks to declining transportation and telecommunications costs, distance really doesn’t matter anymore. So it is ironic that another Economist writer, Ryan Avent, has written a new book arguing that “Distance is not […]
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