Randal O’Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. In his book The Best-Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation. O’Toole’s latest book is American Nightmare: How Government Undermines The Dream of Homeownership.
While doing research for my map of the New Feudalism, I found this 2010 book by Irish journalist Kevin Cahill. Despite the shrill cover rhetoric, the book is basically a nation-by-nation (and, in the United States, state-by-state) inventory of land ownership patterns. There are a lot of question marks about some countries, but it helps...
Last week, the Federal Housing Finance Agency released its quarterly home price indices for the fourth quarter of 2015, so we now have a 41-year time series for every state and many metropolitan areas. The numbers show that, even after adjusting for inflation, housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area have exceeded prices during...
Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, inspired by media reports – accurate ones – of a guarded and growing rapprochement between Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan on issues where they share common values, we published an editorial entitled “A Left-Right Alliance Against Public Sector Unions?” Drawing from Nader and Buchanan’s recently published missives, we identified five areas...
Editor’s Note: These few paragraphs by “anti-planner” Randal O’Toole say everything that needs to be said about how flawed policies artificially inflate the price of housing, making it unaffordable to any middle class family. California provides perhaps the most egregious example of this misanthropic bias towards “smart growth,” and “urban service boundaries,” the practical effect...
A new report from the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works shows just how a handful of left-leaning foundations have taken control of the once-grassroots environmental movement. These foundations both shape the environmental agenda and help put people in power in the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaucracies. Click image to download...
Los Angeles transit officials are eagerly contemplating the opportunity to spend money converting the Orange bus-rapid transit line into a light-rail line. To promote this idea, they are letting people know that light rail will be faster, more comfortable, and operate more frequently (so riders will be less likely to have to stand) than buses. These lanes...
Editor’s Note: The median price of a home in San Francisco has just topped $1.0 million. The median price for homes throughout California, measured at $466,000 in June 2014, edges close to a half-million. Nobody, apart from the very wealthy, can really afford homes at these prices. Yet these outrageous prices are entirely the result...