What City Observatory Did This Week
Repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. The I-5 Rose Quarter project is over budget at $2.1 billion, just lost more than $400 million in federal funding, and failed to get any additional funding from the recently adjourned Oregon Legislature. And the Governor says she’s only going to ask for money for basic maintenance functions at the state transportation department. Nonetheless, the Oregon Transportation Commission voted to continue the project, even though, as the Commission Chair noted, “With that said, everyone in this room needs to understand that beyond that, there is no money… We are not saying that we are going to move forward with a complete Rose Quarter.”
As City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Commission prior to the vote, proceeding with the project without funding in hand is a recipe for worsening the department’s already perilous financial state.
ODOT staff haven’t accurately predicted or managed costs and have been excessively optimistic about future revenues. They’ve marched ahead with mega-projects they didn’t have full funding for, doing anything—saying anything—just to get a project started, knowing that once it was started, you would have not choice but to provide the money to finish it.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Transportation Commission is repeating that same mistake, committing to continuing work on a project without the needed funding to finish it, setting up future policy makers with an even worse financial problem than the state faces today.
Must Read
Seattle begins to realize it has a ward system of government. Ryan Packer has an interesting analysis of how the election of City Council members from each of seven districts is re-shaping the governance of the city. Prior to 20xx, all councilors were elected at-large, but since then seven of the nine councilors were elected from geographic, single-member districts. And unsurprisingly, at least to those who are familiar with say Philadelphia or Chicago (or many other cities), the officials representing these areas are demanding their voices be heard about matters affecting their part of the city.
In a departure from past practice, a new dynamic has been developing since Seattle’s 2023 council elections in which the voices of the seven district councilmembers are elevated up over their colleagues when it comes to issues within district borders. This is happening across multiple areas, including human services and transportation, and could play a major role in upcoming votes on amendments to the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan.
It remains to be seen how much the system of district elections balkanizes Seattle policies, and whether, for example, the “One Seattle Plan” effectively becomes seven Seattle plans. One ominous sign: district elections tend to favor NIMBY politics–you get elected to your district by shielding it from people and uses that you’d rather see go somewhere else. One study showed that cities with district elections tended to produce less housing than cities that had at-large elections.
The Urban Hellscape Myth. Economist Paul Krugman takes head on the notion that cities are somehow more dangerous that suburbs or rural areas. The data–which have a well known liberal bias–show that city residents are safer.
New York City as a whole has a very low rate of violent deaths by national standards, partly because of its low murder rate, but also because many of its residents take public transit, which is much safer than driving.
As he points out car crashes are a leading cause of death among younger people around the US, and this the relatively poor safety record of US roads is something we ought to pay much more attention to.
Actually, if you’re worried about a public safety crisis in the United States, you should worry both about guns and about the rising number of vehicle fatalities, which are much higher in America than in other rich countries:
What’s the next political move for YIMBYs? The “Not in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement has had extraordinary success in changing the policy discussions of housing, and especially state and local land use policy. Two leading voices of the movement, Chris Elmendorf and  David Schleicher, have an essay exploring what the movement needs to do to broaden and deepen its progress. They argue that YIMBYs need to spend more time talking about the quality of life in great urban spaces–to help built the case for density among density skeptical groups, and that YIMBY’s need to think about more explicit, formal and permanent political organization, especially at the local level.
For example, they argue that YIMBY advocates must move beyond just affordability and more housing to better places and an improved quality of life to assure long term political success:
Making cities into broadly appealing places is essential to building support for more production of dense housing. If nonurbanites come to see big cities as culturally alien, they may sour on policies that would grow cities or make the suburbs more city-like.
In a world that often seems dominated by policy paralysis and political polarization, the YIMBY movement has made significant strides among both blue and red constituencies. YIMBY’s next act may be more consequential for them, and also for the broader polity.