American Dream

Franklin Tennessee wants to ban the construction of houses with garages in front, derisively called "snout houses" by urban planners. Somehow, planners believe, putting garages somewhere else will reduce driving and lead to a greater "sense of community."

The alderman proposing this ban says houses should emphasize people, not cars. But guess what: Every car leaving or entering a garage has a person or people in it!

Maybe Franklin should just require that all houses be made of glass. After all, the houses should emphasize the people inside them, not the building materials that wrap around them.

Seriously, rules like these simply contribute to less-affordable housing. As I've stated elsewhere, planners are confused about which side of the house is really the front and which is the back. The side facing the street is the utility side, where people put their garbage for pick up, collect their mail, and park their cars. The side facing the yard is the true front of the house, where people have decks, gardens, and play areas. Why should homebuyers have to pay extra to decorate the utility side of their house?

Portland's urban-growth boundary is adding millions of dollars to the costs of homes and businesses, and not just because of the scarcity of land that it creates. Today, about the only developable land left inside the boundary is brownfields, steep slopes, wetlands, or other lands that a few years ago would have been considered too expensive to develop.

Now developers are spending millions of dollars extra to use these land. This often includes funds needed to go through the regulatory processes to get approval to use them, including fighting local residents who want to preserve their "scenic views" of an old quarry or other undeveloped area. Naturally, they pass these costs onto homebuyers and other property buyers.

Although Metro, Portland's regional planning agency, has added a few square miles to Portland's urban-growth boundary, most of that won't be available for development for five to ten years. This is because cities need to zone the land and provide water and other infrastructure. Of course, without all of Oregon's regulation, such infrastructure could have been added in a few months.

Oregon's busiest stretch of road is Interstate 84 in east Portland, where traffic has grown by 20 percent in the last ten years. This road is also paralleled by Portland's oldest light-rail line, which obviously hasn't done anything to relieve congestion.

Rail advocates will say, "Think how much worse the congestion would be without light rail." But think instead about how much better it would be if, instead of the light rail, the state had built two new lanes onto the freeway (which would take about the same amount of room as the light-rail line) and charged congestion tolls to use those lanes. Those lanes would then never be congested, and the transit agency could use them to run bus-rapid transit, which would probably take as many if not more people out of their cars as light rail.

The state wouldn't even have had to build those new lanes because this segment of I-84 had HOV lanes that could have been turned into HOT lanes, But those lanes were removed to make room for the light rail. That's progress, Oregon-style: abandon a potential twenty-first century technology in order to build a nineteenth-century solution.

The Congress for the New Urbanism held its annual conference in Pasadena recently and the Orange County Register has a few comments on New Urbanism and freedom. The Register may be the most libertarian/property-rights oriented major daily paper in the nation today, and this editorial was in all probability written by Steven Greenhut, who will be speaking at the Preserving the American Dream conference later this month.

The Associated Press has a great article today about how variable tolls on HOT lanes can relieve congestion. The article points out that this idea is endorsed by Michael Replogle of Environmental Defense, who is also a smart-growth advocate, so perhaps the American Dream and smart growth have something in common after all.

The above link goes to Newsday, but if some reason it doesn't work for you, try the Mercury-News, North County Times, or just go to Google news and search for "toll lanes."