Quick Hits-Condos, Crime & Canada

Quick Hits - Prisoners, Patients and Tenants

With the number of uninsured Americans reaching a record 46.6 million last year, up by 7 million from 2000, Seton is one of a small number of hospital systems around the country to have done the math and acted on it. Officials decided that for many patients with chronic diseases, it would be cheaper to provide free preventive care than to absorb the high cost of repeated emergencies.

Quick Hits—Vanishing Public School Students

Monday Quick Hits—Proximity for Better or Worse

—Congrats to the Tigers for the win last night, but the World Series won't help Detroit very much, and the Super Bowl back in February didn't either.

—More coming this week on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's purchase of the Chicago Board of Trade to create the world's biggest exchange.

—Old fashioned physical proximity still matters in Silicon Valley, while Wall Street looks to Pennsylvania to back up, spread out and spread risk. (More at WallStreetWest.org).

—Speaking of spread-out New York, Brookings finds exurbia ascendant north of the city.

—On the left coast, Witold Rybczynski looks at San Francisco and when bad architecture happens to good cities.

—Back East, The Boston Globe is on track for its first unprofitable year ever, and Julia Vitullo-Martin compares Philadelphia to Boston and finds Philly's culture wanting. (Of course Boston being THE university town, with a built-in high tech sector as such, also helps).

—And Harry Siegel in the New York Post on how Governor Pataki and his fellow incumbocrats hollowed out New York's GOP.

An Exceptional Distortion

Consultant Wendell Cox has an astute essay questioning the methodology of the Heavy Load report on the high combined cost of housing and transportation for working families in urban areas by the Center for Housing Policy. (Here's our post on the report last week, where we expressed some doubt about the numbers used).

As we noted, the Center implicitly argues that people who move farther away from their jobs to save on housing end up spending most all of the would-be savings on transportation. Cox points out that they backed into their numbers by using a "peer-reviewed" modeling technique to end up with transportation costs more than twice those cited in the readily available Department of Labor figures, and minimizing housing costs (this making more dramatic the cost of transportation as compared to that of housing) by using 2000 Census data, thus missing the dramatic jump in urban housing prices over the last few years.

While advocacy groups back into their numbers all the time, it is exceptional to see an affordable housing group, whose mission is to lay "the groundwork for the development of concrete and politically viable policies and programs that can be used to promote affordable housing across the country," use a methodology that minimizes the cost of housing.

Mortgage vs. Motor

The Center for Housing Policy, an affordable housing group, has a new report out called A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families, that's worth a look. Following up on earlier research by the Center that shows "a clear trade off between the housing and transportation costs of Working Families" (note the capitalization), the report shows that while working families in the 28 metropolitan regions studied spend about the same percentage of income on housing as most families (27.7% for working families against 27.4% for all households), their transportation costs are nearly 50 percent greater.

There are some methodological problems here, particularly in the study's definition of working families as those with annual income between $20,000 and $50,000, without adjusting for pay variations between regions. And of course the report is intended to push a chronic affordable housing crisis.

Still, it's striking how little variation there is in combined housing and transportation costs between regions, with working families spending an average of 57% of total income on housing and transportation (against 47.6% for all families), ranging from 54% in Pittsburgh to 63% in San Francisco. There are much greater variances in the housing-transportation split, with St. Louis at 23-32 at one end, and chronic outlier San Francisco at 35-27 at the other.

The Center pushes the claim that apparently affordable housing is often illusory, with all savings and then some eaten up by car and commuting costs. The data doesn't seem to go quite as far, but there's an excellent point at the end of the article linked above—"A three-car family puts a lot of money into depreciating assets, instead of into mortgages and college educations."

Urban Mall Watch

Following up on yesterday's discussion of downtowns, St. Louis thinks it can revitalize itself with an urban mall near its downtown ballpark. We'll be watching.

Elsewhere, the Times of London reports on the revival of the downtown mall in Britain and on the continent. John King at the San Francisco Chronicle considers the Westfield and selling the urban mall. (Favorite quote: a veep of design at San Fran's new mega mall explaining that "We wanted an experience that reflects the complexity of the city… We wanted to reflect that this is not just a machine for selling.") Salt Lake City seeks to create the mall as hub, not island.

Philadelphia, City of Wonders

Philadelphia has long been famous for its “pay to play” governance. It’s 624 page zoning code is a nearly endless source of employment for Center City’s many lawyer-fixers. But now the city has outdone itself in demonstrating the sheer perversity of its zoning codes.

Swing for the fence on the (Zoning Code) By Tom Ferrick Jr. 4/19/6 Imagine the surprise of residents of Philadelphia's Spring Garden section last month when they discovered a 47-story condo project had been approved for the corner of 22d and Spring Garden Streets without a zoning hearing. The reason: The humongous tower - just shy of the height of City Hall - was permitted under the R-15 zoning for the area. The developer got his permit over the counter at the Department of Licenses and Inspections. Imagine the surprise of residents of Northeast Philadelphia a few years back when they discovered they could not get permits to erect fences around their property. The problem: The standard-issue fences on sale at Lowe's and Home Depot are four feet tall, but the city's zoning code allowed only a maximum height of three-and-a-half feet for a fence. Residents who went to the counter at L&I for their fence were turned down. They had to shell out $200 for an appeal to the Zoning Board of Adjustment to get a variance. Philadelphia's current zoning code was devised during the Eisenhower administration and enacted in 1962. (But) The zoning code is changed almost constantly, through piecemeal amendments introduced in City Council. In fact, there were 150 such amendments last year. But so many amendments have been added that the code has morphed into a 624-page behemoth that is considered unreadable and unfathomable. One example: Philadelphia has 55 different zoning designations (as in: R-1, R-2, C-1, C-2, etc., etc.). Most cities have 10 or 12.