Deficit hawk(ing)

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bq. “[L]eave Social Security intact. Paying down debt now is fiscally useful but politically useless. Instead, be bold, invest for future productivity growth in a way that the private sector cannot do, and in ways which (given the dearth of public investments recently) are very expeditious, offering high rates of return… What should the government do, with the present blessing of low long-term interest rates? Obviously, it should borrow! But for a purpose, please — not merely to keep 150,000 soldiers on a mission impossible in Iraq. It should borrow to repair and rebuild our cities, our transport, our schools, our environment — either directly or through state and local government. That’s the only way the country as a whole can become materially richer, a generation from now, than it would otherwise be.

James Galbraith, in “Salon”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/21/greenspan_deficits/index1.html

City aerials

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Someone passed along a link to the city’s aerial mapping application, which is better than the USGS/Terraserver maps because they’re:
– higher resolution, and zoomable to a ridiculous degree
– newer — about a year old
– and taken from a low-altitude airplane, not a satellite, so they have a weird SimCity Classic-like angle to them.

(It starts with a main-streets map; zoom to about 2×2 mile and the photos start to show.)

Here’s one of the ’60s amoeba-shape parks in Sandburg Village, whose angles have been considerably softened in recent years:

Latent impact fees

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Now, here’s a nice twist on growth: Virginia Groark from the Trib reports that the tollway authority is suing a developer for causing traffic backups and, more importantly, reneging on a promise to pay for tollway improvements. This case is exceptional because the traffic jams can be pinpointed on one cause, but it’s perhaps a foretaste of a libertarian future, where social costs like traffic congestion get parceled out via the courts. Hooray.

Gas prices not yet slowing sprawl

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Today’s Trib carries a curious story by John Handley on how high gas prices may eventually slow the spread of sprawl. (With oil prices stuck well above $50 a barrel for the foreseeable future, not even invading Iraq and drilling under every playground in Alaska will keep American drivers from fondly reminiscing about $2.50 a gallon next year or so.) It’s curious because the quotes switch from (suburban-based) real estate analysts who point out the possible link between gas prices and sprawl — after all, metropolitan transportation and housing costs are strongly and inversely correlated — and far-edge-exurban commuters (Minooka, Rockford, DeKalb, somewhere near Beloit) who looooooove their big houses and their looooooong commutes. (Hey, life is suffering, right?)

“Gas prices above $2.50 might start to kick in a slowing of the outward movement of housing in the Chicago area,” said real estate analyst Tracy Cross…

For Marianne Hall, who commutes 73 miles–2 hours and 15 minutes on the road each way — from DeKalb to her job in downtown Chicago, “it would take a really big increase in gas to offset the long-term gain we got by moving farther out.”

She and her husband, Randy, a bookkeeper who works from home, and their three children moved from Oswego to DeKalb a year ago.

“It’s a dream home,” Hall said. “We have a huge yard and the kids have the run of the neighborhood; there’s not a lot of traffic.”

Yeah, and if idiots like you keep moving out there, you’ll lose all of it.

But real state analyst Steve Hovany believes that a move toward shorter commutes has begun in the Chicago area.

“People are paying extra to reduce their commute. They’re moving to closer-in, infill housing in the suburbs and to downtown,” he said. “Right now, that inward move is major. It’s being driven by older buyers. Commuting doesn’t grow on you. Empty-nesters won’t buy in the middle of nowhere.”

He also worries about gasoline prices. “The rising price of gas is a jolt that could affect residential sales,” said Hovany, president of Strategy Planning Associates in Schaumburg.

He noted, though, that not everyone can pay for a close-in location, and economics forces many younger couples to start their families on the edge of the Chicago area.

The location of jobs is a key to where new homes are built, Hovany said. “If a new housing development wants volume sales, it has to be within a 35- to 40-minute drive from major job markets.”

And because of growing employment around Schaumburg, Aurora-Naperville and other areas, suburb-to-suburb commuting is on the rise.

Hovany’s company did a study on Waterman, a town 60 miles west of Chicago on U.S. Highway 30. “Though it may be far from the city, it’s only a 35- to 40-minute drive to the Aurora-Naperville job corridor,” Hovany said.

Third wave edge cities like the East-West Corridor will spawn fourth wave sprawl, which will give rise to fourth wave edge cities in places like New Lenox, which will… Well, duh, that’s the way suburban growth paths work. However, what will ultimately break this particular path dependence? The Metropolis Pledge? Employers realizing that locating closer to the center of the region offers them the best access to the largest, most competitively priced labor pool?

Speaking of growth paths, someone pointed out during the development of the Metropolis Plan that the Chicago region’s growth paths have strayed so far from the center that even sprawl at current rates doesn’t look all that dramatic on a map. (The growth path gets wider as it progresses outwards and therefore appears to slow down; each mile of lateral travel encompasses a steadily larger surface area.)

Schadenfreude for Detroit

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An update on the idea of raiding dying but beautiful cities (like Detroit) to dress up today’s drab new construction: a few years ago, the theft of a set of stone lions from the facade of an abandoned Detroit apartment house made the papers after the lions ended up in a set of Edgewater rowhouses, courtesy of brokering by none other than Architectural Artifacts.

The apartments had previously been occupied by subsidized seniors. Senior housing gets such rich subsidies (comparatively speaking; it’s hard to get, but about as dependable an income stream as any imaginable) and has such a bottomless pit of demand that if you can’t keep that up and running, then there’s little chance anything will work.

Bill McGraw writes in the Detroit Free Press:

It’s never easy being a Detroiter in Chicago.

We travel around the big lake and see thousands of charming old buildings there that look like thousands here, except that the old buildings there have windows and roofs and people inside.

That’s why local preservationists are so upset about the discovery that Chicago is the new home for six stone lion heads stolenfrom a once-elegant Detroit apartment tower.

Podiatrists rank walking cities

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Oddly enough, the American Podiatric Medical Association is in favor of smart growth — hence, their survey of municipalities where people walk to work (including those who presumably walk to transit), or walk for exercise, or even own dogs or athletic shoes, which presumably go along with walking:

Arlington, VA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
Portland, OR
Boston, MA
Washington, DC
New York City, NY
Eugene, OR
Jersey City, NJ
Denver, CO

Fight transit service cuts

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Posted to “Chicagoist”:http://www.chicagoist.com/archives/2005/03/10/cta_threatens_imminent_doomsday_crappy_lives_for_passengers.php regarding the CTA cuts:

EVERYONE: If you’re as ticked off by the situation as I am, call your state legislator. Go to vote-smart.org and enter your zip+4 (look at your junk mail) to find out who. In most of America, the entire metropolitan region jointly funds mass transit. In most of the rest of the world, mass transit is a national priority and everyone, especially drivers, pay taxes for it. Here in Chicago, city taxes (mostly) fund CTA and suburban taxes go to suburban transit. This is completely stupid, since transit benefits the entire region: by keeping cars off the roads, by making the Loop a central place to do business, by getting people where they need to go, by allowing many of us to live car free. This way of funding things is stupid, and it’s time for all of us to bang down the doors in Springfield and tell them so.

Sure, CTA could fix some problems within its own house — but $55 million is a lot of money, and CTA runs an almost break-even operation these days (so making up a small deficit requires deep cuts). Even if Wilson Yard sold for an extra million dollars (which it wouldn’t; $30 a square foot wasn’t out of range when the deal was struck), that’s still only a tiny fraction of the amount of cash needed. In fact, CTA runs a tight ship relative to other transit agencies: among American transit agencies, it has the lowest per-hour rail operating costs and the second-lowest taxpayer subsidy per passenger (second-highest farebox recovery ratio, after NYC Transit).

Furthermore, it isn’t just CTA. Several other large cities (those with equally stupid funding mechanisms) are also facing transit funding crises: in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, state cutbacks are threatening equally severe measures: in Philadelphia, the transit board actually passed a budget with $2.50 base fares and NO service on weekends or nights, before the state rushed a bailout. Boston recently completely revised its transit funding, resulting in substantial fare hikes. And Washington’s Metro is threatening vastly higher fares if it can’t secure more dedicated operating funding. Even in the suburbs, Pace and Metra have warned that they face similar cash crunches within the next few years if the situation doesn’t improve — that is, if tax funding continues to decrease in real terms (adjusted for inflation), as it has for the past 20 years.

Most of the money for capital projects comes from the federal government and is earmarked as such; it really can’t be spent elsewhere. The state or local funds in the capital pool are there to “match” the federal money 50-50: divert it and an equal amount of federal money disappears. Yeah, it’s stupid, but Washington is like any big money donor: they like to build things, but don’t care about maintenance. Or you could blame it on the Republicans, who eliminated federal operating subsidies in 1997, and of course want to cut deeply into capital funds today.

Keith: trains, simply put, are much cheaper to run than buses, especially when carrying hundreds at a time. The biggest single cost of running transit is labor — a train can carry a thousand people with one driver, while the same number would have to take ten buses. Plus, the electricity from the rails is cheaper than gas, and rail cars require less maintenance. There are many cases where buses are cheaper than trains, but CTA’s train lines aren’t them.

Katie: the ridership numbers are counted at the farebox. The supplemental paper surveys that are distributed on buses from time to time are not what the ridership numbers are based on.

Real estate investors agree: buildings better than parking

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Nadine Brozan’s article in the Times points out that (surprise!) parking lots are a woeful under-use of space in New York:

A Manhattan commercial real estate broker makes the aesthetic case for ripping up parking lots:

In [the view of Anne De Marzo, a broker who specializes in transactions involving developers and the parking industry], the disappearance of lots is aesthetically beneficial. “We won’t have unsightly garages and lots on desolate streets anymore,” she said. “Instead, there will be beautiful buildings with garages.” She did concede that such beauty has its price: higher fees for drivers.

An executive at a billion-dollar real estate investment trust goes further, saying that (gasp) supply and demand also apply to parking:

Fred Harris, senior vice president of AvalonBay Communities, whose Avalon Chrystie Place will have 713 apartments and fewer than 200 underground parking spots, agreed. “There is some academic research showing that parking capacity encourages traffic,” he said. “And a lack of capacity, while it may be an annoyance, lowers traffic. Parking may be great, but in the city people can live without it.”

The article also says does say that the High Line “is to be revived as an elevated promenade” (emphasis mine). I wonder if Bucktown millionaires would be more amenable to a Bloomingdale Promenade than a simple Trail.

bikes on Metra!

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The Trib’s Jon Hilkevitch reports that Metra’s “self-acknowledged non-bicyclist” (for shame!) Executive Director Philip Pagano and (probably un-acknowledged non-bicyclist) board have approved a plan that would allow bikes on board most Metra trains starting in June — all except weekday trains in the rush direction and trains during special events. And yes, it apparently includes the reverse commute:

“Under Metra’s proposal, bicycles would be prohibited on weekday trains arriving in Chicago before 9:30 a.m. and leaving the city between 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.”

London demographics

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Just FYI, since I was challenged on this recently: the Guardian reports that “At the last census, England as a whole was 87% White British, while London was 59.8%… with a large variation between outer London (65.6%) and inner London (50.5%).”

So yes, we can probably safely assume that now inner London is less than half White British.

young and restless

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Crain’s this week also had an article about UIUC’s attempts to become “the top” public university in the US–a difficult feat in an era of steeply declining state subsidies (although a winning basketball team might help). Somehow, this led me to looking up the exact numbers on the hearsay that Illinois and New Jersey — two densely populated states with below-top-flight state universities — are the top “exporters” of college students.

Luckily, the higher education industry has a surfeit of social scientists tracking it; the National Information Center for Higher Education Policymaking and Analysis not only had exactly the numbers I was looking for, but detailed crosstabs and graphs of state-to-state migration by age bracket (20-somethings, adults) and education level, and a tasteful color scheme, natch.

In numerical terms, New Jersey and Illinois are the top exporters of college students, sending a net of 24,246 and 11,762 students out of state. Relative to the state’s population, only outliers Alaska and Hawai’i (with young, comparatively underdeveloped higher education offerings and literally a vast new world on the mainland to compete with) fare so poorly.

In the grander scheme of things, the bigger question is about the flow of human capital through the education pipeline. Both Iowa and Massachusetts do a comparably good job at educating their children: 28% of their ninth-graders go on to finish college (within six years), the top rank in a country where only 18% do. However, where Massachusetts benefits from other states’ investment in primary education — fully 38.8% of its adult residents have a college degree–Iowa is one of those underwriting other states’ dynamic, post-industrial economies, with 25% of its adult residents holding college diplomas (lower than the 26.7% national average).

A look at overall migration by state bears out the Bill Frey/Bruce Katz division of states into Melting Pot, Sunbelt, and Heartland. Sunbelt states in the South are gaining tens of thousands of residents, but primarily at lower educational tiers. States with strong post-industrial economies (the Pacific states, the Northeast) attract the young and college educated but not really those with less education — in some cases, like California, the less educated are moving away. And, in many cases, even those college graduates leave as older adults.

Meanwhile, the states of the Great Plains and northern Mountain West are leaking residents, especially college graduates. The industrial Midwest is faring better, but Ohio lost a net of 12,000 young people (age 22 to 29 in 2000) with college educations left between 1995 and 2000, along with nearly 4,000 adults (age 30 to 64 in 2000) with graduate degrees. The numbers are equally discouraging for Pennsylvania: 32,000 young degree-holders.