Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Sell the roads...

Amending the discussion of the proposed Phoenix Trolley below, this is a speech I wrote and delivered two years ago. It presumes a fairly intimate knowledge of The Valley of the Sun, but I can give you a quick cheat sheet: The streets I name are major thoroughfares.

The real estate development is a type I have discussed before. I came up with this idea when I was a teenager in New York more than twenty years ago. So far, almost nothing like this has been built anywhere. This might lead you to think that I am a crank. In contrast, I think it means this idea is way overdue.

Finally, so no one has doubts, what I am talking about is all purely free enterprise--no subsidies, no giveaways, no brother-in-law specials. American cities have been ruined by what fools call "public-private partnerships". This is a discussion of how one major American city can redeem itself by getting shut of foolishness.

Sell the roads...

In 1867, Colonel Jack Swilling looked out over the desolate Salt River Valley. He saw the trenches threading through the Valley and surmised they couldn't be natural in origin. Upon closer inspection, he realized what they were: An elaborate system of irrigation canals built by the vanished Hohokam Indians. He organized an exploitation company to re-open the canals and sell irrigated farm-land.

This marked the first time that a Phoenix real estate developer capitalized on property improvements paid for by someone else. It wasn't the last time...

The soul of Valley real estate development is subsidized property improvement. Less than 40 years after Swilling founded the town of Phoenix the first federally-subsidized water gushed into the Valley. Taxpayer-subsidized flood control enabled developers to build where they shouldn't, and rate-payer-subsidized utility lines permitted people, either idled or addled, to live in the remote desert. And everywhere, billowing forth like black confetti, were the free roads.

Free! Not paid for by you, not paid for by me, just a free gift of boundless horizons, endless vistas, wide-open roads leading everywhere.

Of course, the purpose of those free roads is not to get you from Point A to Point B. The purpose of free roads is to increase the value of developable real estate.

Do you doubt this? Drive south on the 101 Freeway on either side of town. In Avondale, where once cotton battled the sun with subsidized water, there now sprouts a different crop: Vast fields of tract homes. In Scottsdale, mountains once too remote for all but the idled and addled are bedotted with mansions in the making. The 101 was not built to solve a traffic problem. It was built to make developable real estate attractive to home-buyers. And in due course, those home-buyers will create a traffic problem on the 101.

And in the midst of this frenzy of subsidized development, environmentalists and reporters and people who simply love the desert beat their breasts in despair. Why does Phoenix always grow outward? When will it ever grow up?

Maybe a transit subsidy will promote high-density development. Maybe incentive programs and tax abatements. Maybe a glitzy PR campaign...

Those things have never worked, and they never will. But here is something that will:

Sell the roads.

Sell the roads because building and maintaining free roads is a perverse incentive to continued wanton, low-density development. When the true cost of driving a car is borne unambiguously by the driver, the benefits of living cheek-by-jowl in town become more obvious.

Sell the roads because, as in every other business, a thousand entrepreneurial minds are better than one monolithic, bureaucratic, governmental mind. A road is not just traffic and pedestrians. It's power and telephone lines and fiber optic cables. When you see the same arterial street torn up three months in a row, by three different utilities, you're seeing how a businessman's mind does not work. Why aren't there easy accessways to the cabling, much as you have in your office building? No bureaucrat faces bankruptcy for making the same bad decision over and over again. No bureaucrat loses income when you switch to a better-managed artery.

Sell the roads because they can be so much more than roads. Picture Camelback Road, east to west, from the 101 to the 101. Below street level let's put a parking lot from sidewalk's edge to sidewalk's edge, as many levels deep as the traffic will bear. That parking lot runs for more than 23 miles. Maybe above it there's a transit system, self-navigating pods with an infinite number of potential destinations--including the office and apartment buildings abutting this Camelback superstructure. At the street level, let the cars roll; what's Phoenix without cars? But above that comes the real structure. A tres-chic shopping mall that runs from curb to curb for more than 23 miles. And the roof of that immense structure is a park, a tree-lined greensward with paths for walkers and bikers and joggers. And sprouting from that park, the tallest trees of all, are skyscrapers--office buildings, apartments, hotels, even light industry.

Homes, jobs, shopping and entertainment for hundreds of thousands of people. It can be built a segment at a time, as it is cost-justified, and the many skyscrapers along Camelback could build walkways and transit stops to connect with this structure. Camelback Road is no longer a road: Access to and delivery of have become the same product--as they should be. Even the poorest-of-the-poor have it better: The sidewalks on Camelback would be shaded for more than 23 miles.

Camelback Road from the 101 to the 101 is hundreds of acres. What would developers be willing to pay to develop--vertically--the most valuable real-estate in Phoenix? What would developers pay for Washington from the I-17 to the I-10? For Central from Washington to Camelback? For Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue from the mountains to the mountains? For Bell Road, dream of all dreams? What would they be willing to pay to develop the freeways? Taking that transit system with them--clean, quiet, secure. Taking away the necessity of traveling immense distances each way, every day.

If we sell the roads, will all of us settled suburbanites abandon our tract homes all at once? Not everyone, and not all at once. But as people reflect upon the true costs of suburban living, undisguised by subsidies, many of them will discover the joys of living in the city. Lower housing costs. Much lower transportation costs. More time at home. And a bike paths that run for miles and miles without a stop light. At a minimum, Phoenix will stop growing outward. In time, it may be possible to return whole neighborhoods to something like the native state.

And even in suburban neighborhoods, selling the roads makes sense. Neighborhood associations could resolve to narrow their streets, for instance, to discourage through traffic and to permit the children of Phoenix to play in the street at last.

If we sell the roads, we will stop subsidizing rapacious development. If we sell the roads, we can manage them in ways that make sense. If we sell the roads, we can generate substantial revenues for cities, the county and the state. If we sell the roads, we can begin to develop this Phoenix--this firebird born from the ashes of the Hohokam--as she should have been developed at the time of Col. Jack Swilling: No out into the desert, but up toward the sun.

posted by Greg Swann at 10:15 PM

 
Which way will the Trolley go? The Way Of The Booster!

I have written before about the Trolley system that boosters want to build in Phoenix, despite the obvious fact that it will fail hugely at huge expense. As with Houston's train of fools, supporters are impervious to facts.

That was made plain this week. The Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute (yes, that Goldwater) released a definitive study of the Trolley plan. The summary is damning, but the full PDF version is astounding, page 25 in particular.

The Arizona Republic's response was amazingly disingenuous:

Last week, the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute published an anti-transit report written by Libertarian economist John Semmens that says light rail wastes money, serves too few riders, is not cost effective, etc., etc.

This is the mantra of light-rail opponents. But in cities across the Midwest and West it has fallen on deaf ears.

"I refuse to listen to you, therefore you can't be right."

Semmens argues that automobile drivers match or exceed their tax-cost in taxes paid, where Trolley users will be tax-subsidized at 95%--for every dollar the passenger puts into the fare box, the tax-payers will put in 19 dollars. The net subsidy per rider will be nearly $6,000 a year, enough to buy each one of them his own automobile--car payment, tags, title, insurance, fuel and maintenance. It's possible that his numbers can be challenged, but the fact is that none of the Trolley's supporters have challenged them. Instead, they smear him.

The fact is that even the transit authority, Valley Metro, concedes that, post-Trolley, traffic will move slower on the Trolley route and pollute more, with only one car in 1,000 having been emptied by the Trolley. It will fail to do everything it promises to do at an outrageous cost--$789 per inch for construction alone.

Putting these things to a vote is less than useful, I expect: 99.99% of Valley residents are already voting with their tires. I think this headline from The Onion tells the whole story:

98% OF U.S. COMMUTERS FAVOR PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION FOR OTHERS

When it was pointed out that the HOV lanes were failing to relieve congestion, then-Governor Jane Hull argued that we must wait until the entire network is completed to see if that makes a difference. This same argument will be deployed again and again to wave away complaints about the empty Trolley cars that will replace the now-empty buses.

This is The Way Of The Urban Booster: Proponents of some stupefying boondoggle cite the hoped-for benefits but don't disclose the costs, omitting mention of or deemphasizing the inherent trade-offs. This is horrible economics, so I suppose it must be really, really good politics...
posted by Greg Swann at 9:30 PM

 
Birthing a criminal enterprise...

This is from the Casa Grande Valley Newspaper, an extremely small paper. Whoever coded this page can't, so it's tough-sledding to read. What's interesting is that residents of an unincorporated county area are striving to inflict a city government upon themselves:

Four Pinal County residents who are leading the push to create a new town spoke at an informal meeting Thursday night at San Tan Heights Elementary School. The main purpose of the meeting was to create committees to discuss and mull over the many needs and goals of a new city. This community with no name got its first grocery store this week when Fry's opened. There is also a Bank of America, a Circle K with gas station and thousands of houses. The thrust of the incorporation is to redress this imbalance and to have local control over how the area grows.

More:

And their goal is aggressive. Taylor said they'd like to become a town or city - with a name - by August. "The quicker we get our own revenues the quicker we can shape the area's future," he said.

And still more:

Fundamentally that's police and fire services, school quality, zoning and taxes - how high and how they are spent.

Police, fires, schools and property taxes are already being dealt with by the county. The ultimate issues will be more taxes, municpal employees and zoning. Right now there is no zoning, which means that retailers can decide with their own minds where demand exceeds supply. Imagine that!

I can't decide if these people are taxaholics, control freaks or just idiots. Their central complaint seems to be that high-volume retail comes late to previously-undeveloped areas, but I can't imagine how they would expect it to be different. It takes thousands of customers to pay for a 60,000 square foot supermarket, so the supermarket can't be built until there are thousands of new residents moved-in and ready to go shopping. Establishing zoning and increasing taxes will raise the marginal cost of doing business. This will not promote commercial development, it will retard it.

But wait. There's more:

He said the growth is inevitable. If the 15 or so developers continue working independently, there will be a wide variety of designs, concepts and no specific zoning and order, he said. If nothing but houses are built and it gets crowded and uncomfortable, people will want to move out again, depreciating the price of homes. "Then you become Coolidge or Florence," he said.

There are two problems with this logic. The first is the presumption that retailers won't come, if there are residents enough to support their businesses--a specious claim that runs contrary to all the other specious complaints about greedy businesspeople. And second, Coolidge and Florence are already inflicted with the miracle of municpal government.

These wannabe dogooders/willbe dobadders live in a partial paradise, with one less layer of government than is inflicted upon nearly everyone else. This they must destroy. The home builders who gave them the wonderful homes they could not build for themselves (and Johnson Ranch is very nicely done for a low-budget master-planned community) won't care; they will have moved on to the next project. The retailers won't care; they will either build or not build (where permitted) based on their own business plans and profit projections. But the residents, willing or not, will be forevermore encysted with yet another criminal enterprise disguised as a "public servant". How sad...
posted by Greg Swann at 7:31 AM

 
The price of greatness...

I don't care what anyone says. Mars won't be a world-class city until it has light rail and a zoo!
posted by Greg Swann at 7:37 AM

 
Dennis Miller needs a Nolan Chart

From the New York Times, Dennis Miller betrays a need for a Nolan Chart in order to discover that he's a Libertarian--for now at least:

Mr. Miller is also not a traditional conservative. 'I've always been a pragmatist,' he said. 'If two gay guys want to get married, it's none of my business. I could care less. More power to them. I'm happy when people fall in love. But if some idiot foreign terrorist wants to blow up their wedding to make a political statement, I would rather kill him before he can do it, or have my country kill him before he can do it, instead of having him do it and punishing him after the fact. If that makes me a right-wing fanatic, I will bask in that assignation.'

Mr. Miller said he remained socially liberal. 'I think abortion's wrong, but it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong,' he said. 'So I'm pro-choice. I want to keep my nose out of other people's personal business. I guess I fall into conservative when it comes to protecting the United States in a world where a lot of people hate the United States.'

Like the "Eagles" Andrew Sullivan sometimes talks about: Fiscally conservative, socially liberal, supportive of the War on Terror. Libertarian de facto, but not by philosophy. Possibly getting these people committed to liberty at an ideal, rather than as a practical idea, could make a difference. I don't think they can defend their beliefs from the constant onslaughts of the left without developing a philosophical base.
posted by Greg Swann at 11:00 PM

 
Islam watch: As if we didn't know...

From the Pakistan Tribune:

The holy war has nothing to do with killing but is more akin to the arduous struggle of a hatching chick with its shell. Jihad is a confrontation with the conditioned self and a breaking through that false identification into a direct experience of the sacred, the eternal. This direct experience of joy and love for all things is the paradise or heaven of all the religions. The death we have to undergo to get to this heaven is a death of the ego.

See the thing is, if people of the West are slaughtered, it's their own damn fault. If they had destroyed their lives from the inside, they would welcome death and thus would be immune from slaughter.

The author is not a Muslim. He's a Communist of the Bhuddist flavor, as if that matters. Do not ever say that these people, whatever their external plumage, don't tell you in the baldest language what their goals are. They disclose it all. That you don't believe them is your failing, not theirs.
posted by Greg Swann at 5:25 PM

 
BetterVegas: The Horseshoe will be spared for another hoof, but Glitter Gulch is still in peril



As was easy to foresee, Harrah's will pick up everything it wanted from Binion's Horseshoe, then sell the property itself to someone else. This from today's Las Vegas Review Journal

The sale of Binion's Horseshoe could prove pivotal to positioning Harrah's Entertainment as the biggest operator in gaming but end up costing downtown Las Vegas a world famous brand and the hallmark World Series of Poker.

Three days after federal marshals forced the Horseshoe's closure by seizing about $1 million from the casino's cashier's cage to cover about $2 million in unpaid union health and pension payments, Harrah's on Monday announced a deal to buy the hotel-casino from owner Becky Binion Behnen for an estimated $50 million, most of it in the form of assumed liabilities held by the landmark downtown property.

Sources close to the deal said Harrah's jumped at the opportunity to control the brand name in Nevada. It already was moving to control the Horseshoe brand nationally with the announced agreement in September to buy out Horseshoe Gaming Holding Corp. for $1.45 billion.

A few weeks ago, Harrah's would have paid $50 million for the Nevada rights to the Horseshoe brand alone--not that this would have provided more than momentary relief for the Behnen's mismanagement style. Now they get the whole shootin' match at fire-sale prices. Harrah's has closed the poker room in every property is has ever bought, so I'm skeptical that it will keep the World Series of Poker, but time will tell.

And you might read all this as better than expected news for Downtown Las Vegas. Maybe so, but not all the news is good. Note this from yesterday's R-J:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that the Fremont Street Experience is a public forum where all free speech activity is permitted.

The high court's refusal to hear an appeal brought by the city of Las Vegas and the Fremont Street Experience, issued without comment, opens the door for protesters, petitioners, panhandlers and pamphleteers, who have been kept at bay by city ordinances, to descend on the pedestrian mall.

This strikes me as a good way to distinguish Libertarians from Civil Libertarians, even Civil Libertarians on their best behavior. Freedom, to me at least, means the freedom to do what I want to do, not the freedom of any random stranger to do unto me. The real crisis here comes from the endemic contradiction of "public property", of course, and this inane idea poisons city life every which way. But the Civil Libertarian ideal of a "public square" where any raving crank can spew out his stem-winders unmolested is directly opposed to the right of the patrons of The Fremont Street Experience to have their own good times unmolested.

This, right here, is the public square, in a way it never could have existed in the eighteenth century. But if we must have an inane eighteenth century "public square" on our inane twelfth century "public property," then let's at least have the appropriate and time-tested countervailing form of coercive molestation: Rotten tomatoes. Picketers? Panhandlers? Protesters? Porn-pushers? Pamphleteers? Bring 'em on! They'll make nice targets, and nice entertainment.

This won't happen, of course. If the city of Las Vegas cannot come up with some way to control these cretins, they will destroy what remains of the value--to the customer--of Glitter Gulch. "Free speech" will reign, but the freedom of the individual patrons to do as they want will have been destroyed.
posted by Greg Swann at 8:05 AM

 
(Un)BetterVegas: Penalizing what works, rewarding what doesn't

From this morning's Las Vegas Review Journal, an article on the continuing crack-down on pedicabs, bicycle-powered rickshaws, on The Strip:

Las Vegas police arrested 12 pedicab operators Saturday during the latest crackdown against the human-pedaled taxis.

Bicycle officers surprised the operators at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which was holding the Consumer Electronics Show.

When the officers rolled in, the pedicabs rolled out in droves, Sgt. Thomas Jenkins said.

'We got as many as we could,' he said. 'A lot of them got away.'

This is the same Las Vegas, please understand, that is even now building a very stupid nowhere train in a very stupid location. Whatever their faults, the pedicabs solve the actual transportation problem on the actual Strip--which is why they were congregated around the Convention Center, waiting for the CES traffic. And in that behavior they illustrate the inherent superiority of free-market transportation systems over governmental or quasi-governmental boondoggles. Entrepreneurs invest their own capital and risk their own time in pursuit of profit. Because of this, they are more than usually likely to be aware of market opportunities--circumstances of temporarily increased demand. In fact, as I discuss here, The Strip doesn't need any sort of big-budget transit system, not even a squeaky-clean totally free-market system, NOT EVEN IF IT WERE BUILT IN THE RIGHT FROLICKING PLACE. The pedicabs would more than adequate, if they were permitted to operate.
posted by Greg Swann at 8:37 AM

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