Proposed changes to the RTA’s governance structure — a 15-member board headed by a chairman appointed by the governor — would do little to change the fact that the RTA’s governance favors the suburbs. Seven members from the collar counties would be balanced by seven from Cook (including six from the city), even though Cook County accounts for 80% of all transit rides and 65% of the population of the six-county region.
Thinking through the big box
An interesting bill now before the California General Assembly would better inform municipalities’ decisions about big-box retailers:
“[S]tate Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) has introduced legislation that would require large retailers that sell groceries to pay for economic impact studies that could be used to kill any future expansion. Unions and other Wal-Mart critics say such stores hurt the economy because they pay low wages and squeeze out smaller retailers.
The bill would prohibit a city or county from approving any store larger than 100,000 square feet that also devotes at least 10% of its space to selling groceries, if an economic report shows that the surrounding community would be harmed.
It would require Wal-Mart or other superstores to pay for the studies, although they would have no say in choosing which independent consultant would be hired by local officials. Economic and environmental impact reports can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Alarcon said local communities, dazzled by the prospect of huge sales tax revenues, sometimes don’t think rationally before accepting big-box stores. When he was a Los Angeles city councilman in the mid-1990s, Alarcon said, he helped steer a Wal-Mart to a mall in Panorama City rather than to a former General Motors plant, which became a mall. He said the compromise allowed both places to flourish.
“Wal-Mart almost literally has the effect of creating a black hole and sucking all the economic energy of some of the smaller businesses in the community,” Alarcon said. “A mistake some smaller communities make is they fail to take into account the effect on the community as a whole.”
[Robert Salladay writing in the LA Times, via Chicago Tribune]
The article also mentions that Gov. Davis had signed a law barring tax incentives for big boxes — a huge problem in California, where municipalities fall over themselves to snag sales taxes in a state deprived of property taxes — unless “sales tax revenue from the big-box store is shared by the winning and losing cities.” Tax base sharing, but on the sly. I like it.
Scam spam variants
I’ve inherited the duty of checking a general email account as part of my job. Of course, this general email account has been in existence, and liberally posted to the web, since the early 1990s and as a result receives a constant stream of spam. Oddly enough, the throwaway webmail address I set up in the mid-90s receives mostly pharma-spam, whereas the work account receives a lot of 419 “Nigerian” scam spam. One amusing message from today appeals to faith-based charity:
DONATION FOR THE LORD.
Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to church or better still a christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein.I want a church that will use this fund to fund churches, orphanages and widows propagating the word of God and to ensure that the house of God is maintained.
Porkers
Taxpayers for Common Sense has helpfully put up a list of “earmarks” — those pesky little line items that legislators tack on to appropriations bills — attached to HR 3550, the House TEA3 transportation reauthorization. Among the goodies for Chicago are $18 million for Lake Shore Drive and the lakefront parks, nearly $9 million for road and transit improvements around CHA redevelopment sites, over $50 million for Bill Lipinski’s glorious plans for Ogden Avenue, $4 million for roads around the new Ford plant in Hegewisch, and $3 million for unspecified “bike/pedestrian paths.” Someone managed to swing $1 million to study the Oak Park freeway cap.
Highway bill funding formula again favors roads, penalizes transit use
New York politicians are especially concerned about a proposal that was tucked into the spending package that was approved by the Senate several weeks ago. It would eventually require that all states receive a larger percentage of what they pay in in gas taxes, which are in turn used to finance the nation’s transportation needs. Under the existing formula, New York and other states with heavily used mass transit systems draw a larger share of these funds. But the provision would ensure that all states got a greater percentage of the total amount they pay in gas taxes.
Many New Yorkers complain that the proposal, if adopted, would reward gas-guzzling states, where people commute largely by car, at the expense of states like New York.
The reaction from City Hall bordered on indignation. “New Yorkers shouldn’t be penalized for using mass transit,” said Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York City Democrat, went further, taking a poke at relatively heavy gas-consuming states.
“New York has invested huge sums in mass transit,” he said Thursday on the floor. “Therefore, we are more energy efficient. And apparently, because we are more energy efficient, because we save on sending money to the Middle East, we must be punished by getting less.”
[NYT]
Sonoma farmers support smart growth
In an interesting alliance, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau and Greenbelt Alliance (a local environmental group in the Bay Area) have released a Land Use Audit intended to shape land use policies in Sonoma County.
Sonoma’s farming economy is, needless to say, a little different than the usual: vineyards command high market prices and attract considerable tourism to Wine Country, significantly filling the cash chasm that typically separates metropolitan and rural economies. Farmers in Northern California may also be happier with farm life; it sometimes seems that farmers in many other locales (especially given that the average age of American farmers is rapidly headed toward 65) are land speculators first and farmers second. Still, the Audit is a political breakthrough in coalition-building, since farmers had opposed earlier proposals to implement growth controls in Sonoma and elsewhere in California.
Comments closed
Unfortunately, I’ve had to set new posts so that comments are closed. A few spam comments have been posted, and they’re a pain to deal with.
Update: I’ve installed MT-Blacklist to block certain text strings. We’ll see how well it works at blocking posts to older entries; eventually, I may open up commenting on newer entries.
Subway series
The Times is running a package of articles on what the subway means to New York to celebrate the subway’s centenary.
Amish on the move
Speaking of Americans moving: “Wisconsin is very hot right now for the Amish,” said Donald Kraybill, an academic and author from Pennsylvania who is a leading analyst of Amish migration. [Trib
New Urbanism = walkable neighborhoods
Peter Calthorpe (well, quoted by Andres) once distilled New Urbanism into two words: diverse and compact. John Massengale has a different phrase: walkable neighborhoods.
The short answer is that New Urbanism is about the making of walkable neighborhoods.
The short answer implies 3 things, all necessary for a walkable neighborhood:
1) There are places to walk to. That means the neighborhood has mixed uses, with stores and offices as well as houses and apartments.
Leon Krier’s definition of good urbanism is that you can buy a good cup of coffee within 5 minutes of walking out your front door.
2) That the neighborhood is, to use a horribly overused word, “sustainable.” That also has a few implications. The first is that you can fulfill most of your daily needs without getting in a car. If the town or village is isolated, there should be a train station or streetcar: in America, only the poor and the real urbanite will use buses on a regular basis. All of this requires a mix of incomes, so that there is a mix of society and workers.
If everyone has to drive to work everyday, the neighborhood is not sustainable in the long run…
3) People want to walk. That requires safe, beautiful streets. Pedestrians need sidewalks and protection from speeding cars, AND interesting, pleasant things to look at. Just proximity is not enough…
Neighborhoods can be hamlets or villages in the countryside, or part of a collection of neighborhoods in larger towns and cities.
Xtra-cycling
I bought an Xtracycle on a whim yesterday. This nifty contraption is a frame extender: it pulls the rear wheel about a foot back and inserts an extra heavy duty rear rack over. The rack can easily carry as much as a trailer — 200 lbs, to be exact. Best yet, it’s almost ideal for carrying passengers on board.
I’m not exactly sure how I’ll use it (for passengers? cargo?), but it will allow me to carry much, much more extravagant picnics, and maybe help to feed Critical Mass in a very literal way.
Plus, it comes with rockin’ stickers.
Polarity
For unknown reasons, Northern Trust bank — the keeper of Jenna and Babs’ trust funds — has renamed Paul Kasriel’s weekly economics column “positive economic commentary.” The name change hasn’t at all altered its somewhat alarmist tone, particularly on the pending dollar collapse. Kasriel has pinpointed 2005 as the year when foreign central banks, as in 1973, give up on propping up the deficit-wracked dollar by sinking their own currencies with expansionary monetary policy — thereby triggering a dollar collapse, an inflation shock, and a long-term spike in interest rates.
Currently high US productivity is being sustained based on investments in education and physical capital made in the past, but unfortunately, public and personal investment in the US has plunged to Depression-level lows. Businesses are socking away cash (saving, but not investing, since the bubble dampened the market for new ventures), and the Rest of the World is buying up US capital, but personal and government spending is overwhelmingly going to prop up the US consumption machine (or towards dubious wars). “Will these SUVs, McMansions, and government spending programs allow us to grow faster in the future? If not, will we not have to suffer more of a decline in our future (or our children’s future) standard of living when we have to service our foreign debt?” To which I might add: both massive fiscal debts (the entitlement crunch, deferred infrastructure maintenance and investment) and environmental debts will come due in the 21st century. Where will we find the capital to address those needs and maintain the current consumption orgy?
Another interesting idea: since 2001, US GDP has actually declined by about 15%, if dollars are translated into gold. Gold is a more reliable long-term store of value than fiat currency; hence, its longtime popularity in politically unstable societies.
west north 