Monday, September 10, 2018

The paradox of liberal coastal cities and the real reason for growing inequality, Austin embraces BRT, the freeway of the future is congestion-priced, and our growing density

A few small items and one big one this week:
"And last month, [Senator Kirk Watson] gave a big signal that he’s ready to get involved in bringing a full-fledged mass transit system to the area. 
And that it probably won’t be light rail. 
[Capital Metro's CEO has been promoting] a regional system of autonomous, electric-powered buses moving in platoons along dedicated transit rights of way on or next to Central Texas streets."
"In 2017, there were 168,600 households in buildings with 50 or more units — more than double the number in 2013. They are moving to recent large-scale residential additions to the city such as Camden McGowen Station and the Pearl in Midtown."
  • Excellent post on the power of congestion-priced toll lanes (i.e. MaX Lanes).  Turns out the optimum speed for maximum throughput is only 50mph, which was a bit lower than I expected.  I hope autonomous vehicles will be able to go much faster much closer together to move that speed up substantially.
Finally, a market urbanism opinion piece with some great excerpts on the disconnect between liberal aspirations and liberal housing policy is killing coastal U.S. cities (written by a fellow liberal):
"The real problem here is that housing is never just a question of “build” or “don’t build.” It’s “build here” or “build somewhere else.”And if you live in a coastal U.S. city, somewhere else is usually way worse for the environment. People don’t disappear just because they can’t move to our cities; they move to the suburbs of Texas, where housing continues to be produced in abundance and, as a result, costs have stayed reasonably low.
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Some of you may remember the hub-bub in 2014 over Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which examined wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S. over the past few centuries. It was an absolute blockbuster (for an economics book), showing that the share of income coming from returns on capital was increasing over time, which was bad news for those of us who don’t earn most of our money on stocks, property, or other capital investments (i.e., most of us). It was a rallying cry for liberals around the developed world. 
What you may not have heard about was the critique of Piketty’s work by a 26-year-old MIT graduate student named Matthew Rognlie, who basically said that the issue isn’t so much capital in a general sense, but housing in particular. In other words, the growing value of housing relative to other assets (as well as labor income) is responsible for almost 100 percent of increasing wealth inequality in the Western world.
...
By doing essentially nothing but letting things happen, conservative America is kicking our ass at providing opportunities for low income and working classes to build wealth and get ahead. Cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Atlanta have managed to stay affordable by simply allowing housing to continue to be built as their populations grow, and the result is that people keep moving there.
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So, this is the paradise we’ve built across the liberal cities of the United States. Are we proud? I’m not. We’ve walled off our cities to those of lesser and greater means, making pathetic, often subtly racist or classist arguments about “character” and “culture.” We’ve destroyed any possible opportunity for low income and working class households to build wealth in the same way as their affluent neighbors, or displaced the poor households so that they’re no longer neighbors at all."

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Saturday, September 01, 2018

Flood regs burdening the poor, how Harvey made us stronger, Houston's worker flows and oil export boom, and more

Lots of items this week:
"According to Best Cities, Houston is the seventh-best metropolitan in the country, based on methodology that looks at the place, product, programming, people, prosperity, and promotion of a town. 
"Smart, skilled and soulful, Houston is the American city of the future," the Best Cities website stated in lauding Houston. 
The city landed high marks in terms of place, people, and prosperity. It cited Houston's diversity, housing affordability, and leadership in the health care, manufacturing, engineering, finance, and aerospace industries."
"When George W. Bush signed legislation in 2007 to subsidize and mandate the production of biofuels, he cited the urgent need to liberate America from “long-term” dependence on “oil from foreign lands.” Turns out there was an easier, much less expensive way: drill, baby, drill. 
The Energy Information Administration announced this month that the port district of Houston-Galveston began exporting more crude oil than it imported for the first time. Houston-Galveston exports in April surpassed imports by 15,000 barrels a day, and by May the difference had grown to 470,000 barrels a day. That port district handles more than half of all U.S. crude exports, which hit a record of two million barrels a day in May. 
The export boom is testament to U.S. ingenuity that has driven rapid advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, especially in shale rock. The breakthroughs have lowered drilling costs and put Texas’s Permian Basin at the center of an oil-and-gas drilling revolution that will next year see the state producing more oil than either Iraq or Iran. 
Washington also gets credit for removing regulatory hurdles like the oil export ban. Republican leaders in Congress took flak in 2015 for agreeing to extend green-energy subsidies for a few years in return for Barack Obama’s signature on a statutory end to the 40-year-old export ban. 
Some conservative pressure groups derided the policy trade as a sellout while liberals complained that ending the ban would serve Big Oil. The real beneficiaries are workers, investors and the overall economy, as well as greater flexibility in foreign policy as the U.S. is less vulnerable to authoritarian oil exporters. 
The U.S. is unlikely to be a net oil exporter soon, since American refineries require heavy crude from abroad. Shale drillers produce lighter grades. But the gap between imports and exports shrank in 2017 to a 24-year low of 6.8 million barrels a day from more than nine million in 2012. The lesson is that American invention and entrepreneurship remain indomitable—when government gets out of the way."

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