Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

Housing Affordability Confusion

From the NY Times yesterday, comes a surprisingly confused article arguing that home ownership has actually gotten less expensive over the last 20 years. Here's the article's upshot (and the part that contains the fishy reasoning):

Nationwide, a family earning the median income - the exact middle of all incomes - would have to spend 22 percent of its pretax pay this year on mortgage payments to buy the median-priced house, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy.com, a research company... it remains well below the levels of the early 1980's, when it topped 30 percent.

But median family incomes ain't what they used to be--and comparing family incomes over more than two decades is a case of comparing apples to oranges. To wit: family incomes today are much more likely to include two incomes (even two full-time incomes) than they were in the early '80s when many families were supported by a single primary breadwinner. So--to be overly simplistic with the data for a moment--22 percent of two incomes buys what 30 percent of just one income used to.

The good news here is that the share of women in the labor force has been steadily rising, as has the share of women working full time. Women are also steadily closing the pay gap with men. And because women earn more advanced degrees than men, there's reason to believe the gap may close or even eventually reverse. But the bad news is that families now commonly must employ both adults to make a grab for the brass ring of home ownership. Among other problems, that means substantially less wiggle room in family budgets because if one of the two wage earners falls on hard times, there's no one who can enter the workforce to help pick up the slack.

And there are at least two other glaring problems with the NY Times reasoning. 

Family income is a lousy metric to begin with. Because more and more Americans are delaying marriage (the percentage of unmarried 30 to 34-year-olds has quadrupled since 1970), a smaller and smaller share of us are counted in the family income statistics. This means that the growing ranks of single Americans are facing homeownership with just one income at a time when two are needed.

The Times article also includes a nifty map depicting places where home ownership has gotten more affordable. The curious thing about the map though is that it doesn't appear to say what the writer thinks it does. According to the map, pretty much the entire states of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland have gotten more expensive. So have the Chicago and Boston areas, along with much of Virginia. So even by the Times' rather lousy definition of affordability, a huge swath of the most populated parts of the country have actually gotten less affordable. 

To cap it off, the article smirks that the hoi polloi don't really understand their own economic conditions:

In a nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this month, 75 percent of respondents said they thought most families in their community spent a larger share of their income on housing now than in the 1980's. Only 5 percent said the share was smaller.

The lesson for me is that--at least in this case--it's the people who are right and it's the data analysts who don't seem to understand the economy--or even what their data actually means.

UPDATE 1/3/06: Cleaned up some of the typos and atrocious grammar plaguing the first draft.

The Economist on Happiness

In the past couple of years, it's been interesting to observe a promising idea--that happiness should count as much as economic indicators--become almost mainstream. This week, for example, The Economist published a long, meandering article that examines the concepts of relative poverty and relative happiness. It compares two men--a doctor in Congo and a retired coal miner worker in Kentucky--who earn about the same amount of absolute income. The contrast proves to be a good set-up for some provocative questions:

What is the relationship between wealth and happiness? And what is the significance of relative poverty? Mr Banks makes $521 a month in a country where median male earnings are $3,400 a month. Dr Kabamba earns $600 a month in a country where most people grow their own food and hardly ever see a bank note. The two men's experiences could hardly be less similar. But which of the two would one expect to be happier?

Puzzlingly, though, the article doesn't fully explore this question. It does bring up some important factors, such as the complexities of measuring happiness across different cultures and geographies; the role of relative wealth and poverty; and the role of politics and geography (both Congo and Appalachia are known for mineral wealth and corrupt politics).

But it neglects the new wealth of research that has been released on the economics of in recent years--and one of the most consistent findings: that the correlation between financial wealth and well-being is relatively weak, especially as countries become wealthier (see this post). The US and Canada aren't doing too badly on the happiness scale, but neither are countries that have a far smaller GNP per capita.

As more large-scale studies of happiness are completed, perhaps The Economist will pay closer attention to why indicators of subjective well-being matter--not just as an interesting lifestyle comparison, but as tools that can be eventually used in public policy. For now, though, we'll have to be happy with seeing happiness make it into the news.

P.S. The article includes a discussion on the validity of the United States' poverty rate, suggesting that America overcounts the number of poor. For a healthy debate on the poverty rate as a measure, see this post.

Minimum Rising

As of January 1, minimum wages will rise to keep pace with inflation in both Washington and Oregon. Guaranteeing workers $7.63 and $7.50 per hour, respectively, the two Northwest states are the most generous in the nation. But is a rising minimum wage really a good thing?

Yes.

Make Room!

The good ship Cascadia has another 227,000 passengers.

The US Census Bureau has issued population estimates for the states, which allow us to give an updated Cascadian population tally. As of July 1, 2005, the region – counting British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington – had 15.6 million people. (Adding western Montana, southeast Alaska, and northwestern California pushes that figure up by another million or so, but running the county-by-county figures takes more time than I’ve got at the moment.)

The (four main jurisdictions of the) region added 227,000 inhabitants over the preceding 12 months. That's about the number that live in greater Olympia, Washinton. And it's a 1.5 percent increase, the largest since 1997.

The resurgence stemmed from rising domestic migration into the region. Natural increase (births minus deaths) remained stable at around 70,000 per year, as did international migration at around 50,000 per year. (International migration is hard to tally reliably at present. As the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey comes online, we’ll be able to track it better.)

The extra 227,000 Cascadians, especially the adult migrants, bring new resource consumption, pollution, and traffic as they arrive. But just to be unpredictable today, let me point out that they also bring new talents, productivity, and resources with them.

One dimension of in-migration that’s little noted is the way that growing populations allow more-rapid transformation of metropolitan areas. Cities that don’t have growing populations do not have many opportunities to build complete, compact communities, filling in their urban form. And compact communities can actually reduce resource consumption among their residents. It’s conceivable, in fact, that adding population--if it goes into the right kinds of smart-growth neighborhoods--might lead to such large per-person reductions in resource consumption that the aggregate total remains unchanged or even diminishes.

So migration brings big challenges (about which there’s more here) but it also brings opportunities.

Population Puzzler: Unwanted Pregnancies and Abortion Trends

Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics issued the results of a survey revealing that the share of American births that resulted from unwanted pregnancies increased from 9 percent in 1995 to 14 percent in 2002. (Seattle Times reports here.)

That’s bad news. It’s also puzzling.

It’s bad news because babies conceived by accident, when mothers do not want to have a child (or another child), tend to have what social scientists call “adverse outcomes,” as discussed here. They’re more likely to have bad prenatal care, die in infancy, fare poorly in school, and suffer violence at the hands of their caregivers.

It’s puzzling because so many reproductive trends have improved since 1995. Pregnancy rates overall have fallen, as shown in this chart for Oregon . . .

. . . especially among teens, as shown in these charts for Oregon . . . 

. . . and Washington.

Birth rates overall have fallen. Access to emergency contraceptives has expanded dramatically, as has insurance coverage for prescription contraceptives.

All of these positive trends would make you expect that the share of births that result from unwanted pregnancies has also declined. But the opposite has happened, at least in the United States overall.

The trend is less contradictory within Cascadia. Washington has the best data on unwanted births over time, and they show hardly any change—or hardly any change that’s greater than the margin of error. At best, there's been a tiny decrease in unwanted births.

Still, you’d expect that drops in pregnancies and births would lead to equally dramatic declines in unwanted pregnancies. You’d think, in fact, that improving pregnancy prevention would show itself first and foremost in a declining share of pregnancies that are unwanted. Instead, everything is shrinking dramatically except the “unwanted” percentage!

What’s going on here?

I don’t know.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) in New York is reportedly in the midst of an analysis of this puzzler, and I hope they’ll figure it out. In the meantime, let me underline my ignorance by explaining why the obvious answers are probably wrong or, at least, inadequate.

Pro-choice advocates argue that the survey results are a sure sign of deteriorating access to abortion services, which is plausible. In Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, the number of abortion providers is lower now than it was two decades ago. In 1981, there were more than 160 abortion providers in these states; by 2001, there were fewer than 100, according to AGI.

And the next chart, comparing the share of pregnancies ending in abortion (excluding miscarriages) in British Columbia and Washington, lends further plausibility to the theory. In British Columbia, where abortion providers have not decreased in number to the same degree, abortion has grown as a share of all pregnancies. In Washington, it's shrunk.

Harassment and intimidation from extremists explains some of the drop in abortion providers, but economic consolidation has also contributed. Abortion services have become a specialized medical subdiscipline, concentrated in the hands of fewer providers who are, in general, very good at what they do. First-trimester surgical abortion, therefore, may now be safer and less expensive, in inflation-adjusted terms, than ever before. Convenient, nearby access to safe abortion services does not extend to small-town residents in the inland parts of Cascadia, but most women who want an abortion can get one, by traveling to a city--the same place they have to go for many other surgical procedures.

Anti-abortion advocates have a different exlanation for the rise in unwanted births. They suggest that Americans are demonstrating, in the words of an official at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a “pro-life shift.” American women may be exercising their freedom to choose by electing to have fewer abortions. This explanation also has some plausibility. Abortion rates are lower in more-conservative states such as Idaho than in more-liberal states such as Oregon and Washington. Maybe a cultural change is making the whole country more like Idaho. (And maybe the Washington-BC divergence in the chart above is explained not by changing access to abortion but by changing social values.)

Maybe, but I'm dubious. For one thing, British Columbia has the same anti-abortion movements, the same media influences, and the same medical technology (such as ultrasounds that make fetuses seem like babies sooner) as Washington. But abortion trends have diverged.

For another, if the United States were experiencing such a shift, the recent survey should have found not only that “unwanted” pregnancies but also that “mistimed” pregnancies were being carried to term more often. In fact, if a “pro-life shift” were the cause, one would expect a more dramatic increase in the share of births that resulted from merely mistimed (or “too soon”) pregnancies, rather than from pregnancies that were truly never wanted at all. Women who found themselves pregnant a few years before they intended to be (and were swayed by anti-abortion arguments) would almost certainly be the first to forgo abortions, not the smaller number of women who found themselves pregnant despite their wish never to have a child (again). Wouldn’t the easy cases by “shifted” before the hard ones?

The Center found no such shift.

Between the Center’s 1995 survey (careful, enormous pdf) and its 2002 survey (careful, even larger pdf), in subset after subset of American women (young, old, married, cohabiting, Hispanic, white, first-time mothers, third-time mothers, etc.), there’s a marked increased in the share of births that women report as having resulted from unwanted pregnancies. There’s no comparable change for births that result from the far-more-numerous mistimed pregnancies.

(Oh--and just to muddy the waters futher--the same reasoning also counters the suggestion that a paucity of abortion providers explains the rise in unwanted births. If barriers to getting abortions were the problem, it would presumably afflict the more-ambivalent mothers of "mistimed" births even more than it afflicted women with unwanted pregnancies.)

This unwanted-mistimed patter is so unusual that I wonder, did some wording change in the survey skew the response? (The survey report claims the wording was identical.) Did 9/11/2001 shift women’s attitude retroactively, making them less sanguine about childbearing, and less positive about their births? (Seems unlikely, given that the survey was taken many months later and that it covered a five year period.) Did the Center’s statisticians just make a mistake?

And even if there is some statistical fluke explaining this national survey, why isn’t the Washington state “unwanted” number (and it’s similarly static “mistimed” number) dropping with the pregnancy rate?

My own partly formed suspicion centers on the fewer than 10 percent of sexually active women (and their partners) who do not regularly use contraception and therefore account for about half of all mistimed and unwanted pregnancies. If everyone but them is getting better at prevention, their pregnancies may loom larger in national and state statistics. (There are flaws with this theory, too, but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment.)

Anyone else care to theorize?

Driving Puzzler

Eric Pryne of the Seattle Times today provides a welcome but puzzling update on a project we’ve been watching for some time.

The gist:

The 400 volunteers in the Puget Sound Regional Council's "Traffic Choices" study have been paying virtual tolls since July. Devices mounted on their dashboards track where they travel and transmit the information to a central computer. Charges are deducted from prepaid "endowment accounts."

Those accounts are just play money. But if there's anything left in them when the experiment ends in February, participants get to keep it — in real dollars.

That's the carrot. They can save money by not driving as much, by choosing less-congested highways, or by staying off the road at rush hour.

As we’ve argued for years, paying-as-you-go for driving, rather than in occasional lump sums, ought to be a powerful incentive to economize on miles, trips, and fuel.

Here’s the puzzler:

[Study director Matthew] Kitchen says interim results indicate that, as a group, the study's 400 participants actually are driving a bit more than they did before the experiment started. But they're also paying a little less than they would have if the tolls had been in force when researchers first began monitoring their driving.

That could mean the volunteers are avoiding roads with the steepest tolls at times, even if it takes them out of their way, he says. "But we may find something very different when we do a more detailed analysis," he cautions.

What’s going on here? You put a by-the-mile price on driving and people do more of it? That’s unexpected!

Study results won’t be complete for months, of course, and these preliminary trends may be a seasonal fluke, a statistical error, or an effect of some unrelated factor such as a fuller employment.

But it could also be that drivers are much quicker to change roads than to change modes, or to reorganize their weekly travel plans. Stated that way, it’s less surprising. Past experience suggests that it takes some time for people to adjust where they go.

Still, by the time the study is done, I’ll have to rethink some assumptions if drivers haven’t reduced their total miles driven as well as their peak-hour trips on high-priced, congested roads.

A Gift for the Reindeer Too

A federal judge has halted snowmobile grooming in the recovery area for the Selkirk caribou--the only reindeer to still visit the continental United States. [Coverage in the Olympian and the Coeur d'Alene-area Daily Bee.] The ruling is dead right: snowmobiles are one of the primary threats to the Selkirk herd, which need undisturbed winter habitat. Snowmobiles are still allowed, even under the new injunction, but the absence of groomed tracks will substantially decrease their numbers.

Given that 1) the caribou are often considered the most endangered large mammal in North America; 2) pretty much everyone agrees that snowmobiling is inimical to their survival; and 3) their designated recovery area is a small and remote parcel of mountainous northeast Washington and northern Idaho, the only question I'm left wondering is: why is any snowmobiling at all allowed in their so-called "recovery area"?

And for readers taking note, this is the third good news post here today. Must be the season...

California Dreaming, on Such a Winter's Day...

Just a few days ago, I posted on a mileage-based car insurance program that recently made its debut in Japan -- and hoped that this could hasten the introduction of a similar system on this side of the Pacific.

Now, the LA Times reports on an announcement by California's insurance commissioner that he's planning to...

"...propose rules forcing auto insurers to set rates based on the driving records and miles driven by motorists, and to give less weight to where drivers live — a change that could affect the pocketbooks of 23 million California drivers.

The proposal was embraced by consumer and civil rights advocates who have long complained that city dwellers — especially in minority neighborhoods — pay higher rates than drivers with similar records who live in rural towns and suburbs."  (Emphasis added.)

Seems like the US didn't have to wait for Japan's lead after all.  Obviously, this is not yet a done deal.  But it's still promising -- both because it could make the automotive insurance system fairer to people who don't drive much (notably women, the poor, and city-dwellers), and because it could give all drivers the opportunity to control their insurance costs by driving less.

Christmas Lift

A year-end piece of good news about the Northwest's successful push in 2005 for cleaner cars, via a note yesterday from the Oregon Environmental Council:

"This afternoon, Oregon’s Environmental Quality Commission adopted the clean car standards by temporary rule. By acting before the end of the year, EQC has alerted automakers that they must provide cleaner, more climate-friendly cars to Oregonians starting with model year 2009. These new cars will consume less fuel and produce less pollution. They’ll cost less to operate. And they’ll reduce our dependence on oil."

The one hitch is that the EQC needs to make the rule permanent within 180 days, or it will expire. See more at www.cleancarsoregon.org.

A Grizzly Discussion

A few days ago, I posted on Raincoast's buyout of guide-outfitter hunting rights in coastal BC. The upshot is that I questioned whether the buyout was the wisest possible use of conservation dollars and postulated that conservation investments can benefit from rigorous accounting. As blog posts are wont to do, it circulated around the web where it attracted a variety of feedback--thoughtful rebuttals and inquiries, incoherent ranting, and a fairly vicious attack penned by Chris Genovali, the executive director of Raincoast.

So in response to some of the criticisms--many of which were both thoughtful and thought-provoking--I've decided to post here a response to Genovali. I'm hoping today's post can serve as a useful contribution to a reasoned debate about an issue than many of us care about deeply--species protection. Here goes (gulp)...

Chris,

I must confess that I’m baffled by the venom in your response. A plain reading of my article reveals that--far from being “an opportunistic hit piece”--it was a set of musings and questions about the merits of Raincoast’s buyouts and the larger question of which conservation strategies are most effective at protecting biodiversity. (I encourage readers to take a look at my original article and decide for themselves.)

As a lifelong advocate for wildlands and species protection I’m thrilled by much of what Raincoast has accomplished in BC. But I’m disappointed that Raincoast’s good work is marred by an inability to brook even mild questioning. It is, I believe, worth pointing out that the ecological implications of hunting, even big game hunting, are complex. Personally, I find the trophy hunting of predators abhorrent, but that alone doesn’t mean that, on the whole, it is bad for biodiversity. In fact, the totality of the ecosystem implications of hunting are far from clear and are a subject of ongoing debate among wildlife biologists.

My main objective with the article, a point that I fear may have been overlooked, was to suggest that conservation decisions can benefit from rigorous accounting practices. That is, we need to consider costs and benefits, leverage points, and opportunity costs. Conservationists may have additional ethical issues in mind—the rights of indigenous peoples, trails and access for users, and concerns about hunting, just to name a very few—but these issues ought to be treated separately from the essential question: how can we protect native biodiversity most effectively and efficiently?

In the original post on NEW’s Cascadia Scorecard Weblog, and in its re-publication on The Tyee, I invited information from readers that would prove to me the wisdom of Raincoast’s actions. Your article in response provides some (along with an unfortunate amount of embittered name calling).

For example, it’s clearly germane—as you pointed out—that Horejsi et al. concluded that coastal grizzly populations are depressed and that sport hunting is contributing to the decline. But I remain unclear about why it matters, from a purely conservation perspective, whether guide-outfitter hunting resembles a search and destroy mission. A good conservation accounting would demonstrate that guide-outfitter hunting is especially damaging to grizzly populations in a way that other activities are not—such as hunting by BC residents, clearcut logging, road-building, and even ecotourism. At the least, a solid case could perhaps be made that these other threats cannot be addressed with the resources at hand, and so guide-outfitter rights are the best available buy. I would like to hear that case and be convinced that the buyouts were directed primarily at conservation and not simply at alleviating a practice that some (myself included) find disturbing (that is, trophy hunting).

It’s also relevant that trophy hunting can have ecological implications that ripple beyond the individual animal killed, as Chris Darimont, the conservation biologist you cite, points out. This is a meaningful strike against trophy hunting and, while it is not the only consideration, it is precisely the sort of evidence that is worth weighing in the balance.

I admit, however, to being perplexed by carnivore expert Paul Paquet’s argument, which you quote at length. For one thing, I never suggested that the “only” way to conserve large carnivores is to allow trophy hunting. Instead, I pointed out that trophy hunting has perversely beneficial effects in some contexts. As another example, I  was recently fortunate to visit the world’s leading cheetah conservation center in South Africa. While interviewing their staff biologists I was surprised to learn that a large contingent of experts who have devoted themselves to protecting cheetahs actually support trophy hunting—on the grounds that not hunting cheetahs is actually worse for the animals in the long run. They were willing to take a hard look at the conservation realities and conduct a genuine accounting of the costs and benefits of limited hunting. Perhaps Raincoast has conducted such an analysis. If so, sharing it would help me, and many others, to understand the rationale for your strategy.

Finally, the overall strategy seems confused. If the point of buying the guide-outfitter rights is truly to protect native biodiversity, then the payoff seems small for such an expensive investment. As I understand it, because the buyout includes only certain guide-outfitter rights (not the less expensive rights for BC residents) it prevents the killing of a fairly small number of grizzlies per year and, if I’m not mistaken, the kill rate has been even lower in recent years.

Still willing to be convinced,

Eric de Place

Japan Gets PAYD

Here's a little something I'll be keeping an eye on:  Japanese insurance company Aioi has started to offer pay-by-the-mile car insurance. (See page 2 of this pdf.)  This is an especially nifty development, since it means that Aioi will be working out some kinks in the technology (the company will verify mileage with a device installed in policyholders' cars) which might help PAYD make the leap across the Pacific.

As we've said many times, pay-as-you-drive insurance (or PAYD) offers huge advanatages. Overall, the system is fairer than the all-you-can-drive insurance that most of us buy:  people who don't drive much tend to incur less crash risk, and they wind up subsidizing people who do a lot of driving.  Even the policies that give a little price break for low-mileage drivers still make the people who drive the least subsidize everyone else.  And not only is PAYD fairer to low-mileage drivers, it also creates an automatic disincentive for extra driving:  just as an all-you-can-eat buffet makes it more likely that you'll gorge yourself, all-you-can-drive insurance makes it more likely that you'll drive more than your really need.

We've long been hoping that some auto insurer will offer PAYD in our part of the world.  In 2003, Oregon even passed tax incentives to sweeten the pot. But so far, no company has taken the bait.  And that's pretty understandable -- PAYD suffers from the "first mover" problem, in that the first company to offer PAYD not only has to create a new market for this kind of insurance, it also has to work out all of the technical kinks in tracking and verifying policyholders' mileage. 

But if US insurers can build on Aioi's technology, much of the technological part of the first mover problem gets solved.  And if Aioi can figure out how to market PAYD in Japan, it just might convince US insurers that there might be the same kind of business opportunity on this side of the Pacific.  Neat!

All I Want for Christmas is a Sidewalk

It's the most dangerous time of year to be a pedestrian or a bicyclist: short days mean commutes in the dark, overcast weather obscures pedestrians even during daylight, and rain and snow increase the stopping distance for both drivers and cyclists. But as the Seattle Times reports, better infrastructure, such as in Washington's recently updated wish list of pedestrian and cyclist projects, can make walking and biking both safer and more convenient -- not just in wintertime, but year round.

Periodically King County compiles reports on the causes and situations surrounding pedestrian deaths, most recently for the years 2000 through 2003. In short, most fatalities occur when pedestrians either (a) do not follow traffic regulations, and/or (b) are impaired by age (old or young) or alcohol.

This suggests two things to me. First, that walking is fairly safe if you are a sober, law-abiding adult, especially if you have a safe place to walk. But in King County nearly 13 percent of the pedestrians were hit walking on a road without a sidewalk. And while people over the age of 60 made up one out of every four deaths, most were following the law and crossing in a crosswalk. With limited mobility, seniors often take more time to cross, so changes such as longer signal times and better lighting at crosswalks can make a big difference.

Second, because responsible walking is not as dangerous, building safer places to walk, and advertising them, could not only reduce pedestrian fatalities, but also encourage more walking. (And as we've reported before, there seems to be safety in numbers for pedestrians -- that is, the more pedestrians there are on the streets, the lower the odds that they'll be struck by a car.)

Reading this and other pedestrian fatality and safety studies, it seems to me that, yes, pedestrians need to be visible, follow the law, and look well before crossing the street, but they also need a decent infrastructure for walking -- including sidewalks, bike paths, streetlights, and signaled street crossings. Other countries with much higher pedestrian rates also have much lower fatality rates. We can do better, too.

Parks Instead of Parking - Literally

Talk about cultural creatives!

Via a blog reader, here's a nifty story about a "landscape remixing" effort in San Francisco that illustrates a point we've long made in a small, powerful way.

Between noon and two on November 16, a collective called Rebar turned one of the city's parking spaces into a small park. They fed the meter, rolled out some turf, put up a park bench and a tree, hung a sign, and encouraged people to hang out, read the paper, and enjoy the greenery that would usually be taken up by a vehicle. (Watch the slide show.)

Their aim was to:

"...transform a parking spot into a PARK(ing) space, thereby temporarily expanding the public realm and improving the quality of urban human habitat, at least until the meter ran out. By our calculations, we provided an additional 24,000 square-foot-minutes of public open space that Wednesday afternoon. "

We--and many others--have long talked about the disadvantages of devoting so much urban space to parking. Nice to see a visualization of the positive side of that coin. Is there a Rebar in Cascadia?

Christmas Sneer

'Tis the season to be jolly, and all that.  But, apparently, not if you want to accuse someone--or a lot of someones--of being naughty.  This past Sunday, author Joel Kotkin launched a broadside against Portland, Oregon by publishing a dismissive op-ed in the Oregonian that derides the city thus...

Portland is becoming what I call an Ephemeral City. What do ephemeral cities do? Not much by traditional standards. They don't create a lot of jobs for working or middle-class people. Instead they mostly exist to celebrate themselves and provide an attractive setting for visitors and would-be migrants...

An ephemeral city doesn't compete with lesser places -- you know, those ugly cities with functional warehouses and factories, Wal-Marts and strip malls -- for jobs, companies or investors. An ephemeral city's economy relies largely on a high level of self-esteem among its residents.

Not to put words in Kotkin's mouth, but he seems to believe that Portland is simply too focused on creating an enjoyable city--the horror!!--and not enough on...well, manufacturing or strip malls or something sturdy and middle-American.

Now, I happen to feel that most of what Kotkin is trying to pass of as "analysis" is simply sneering.  And if you scratch the surface, much of his case simply falls apart.

Economist Joe Cortright and George Washington University prof MIchael Lewyn have done a good job pointing out the inconsistencies in Kotkin's thinking -- and, just as importantly, showing where Kotkin's just mouthing off, as opposed to marshalling facts in support of an argument. Just to pile on, here are a few things that I thought worth mentioning...

1. Kotkin writes:  "Portland's sprawl has continued to spiral about as much, or even more, than most American regions."  This, as it turns out, is simply false -- unless, of course, Kotkin has some special definition of "spiral" or "sprawl" in mind.  Back in reality, though, greater Portland has had some remarkable success in recent decades in curbing the loss of farmland and open space at the urban fringe. 
   
   
2. More Kotkin: "Four decades ago, author Neil Morgan used the term 'narcissus of the West" to describe an already self-indulgent San Francisco. Now it's time for the City by the Bay to move over -- the City of Roses wants to take its place in front of the mirror."  Hmmm.  Seems like San Francisco's done surprisingly well for itself over the last couple of decades -- it attracted over 100,000 new residents since 1980; has one of the highest median family incomes in the country; is the major center of the business and finance industries on the west coast.  Etc.  San Francisco ephemeral?  Every city should be so lucky.
   
   
3. Still more..."Portland already has one of the lowest percentages of little tykes among American cities."  True enough.  But the share of households with kids is higher in Portland than in, say, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver.  Portland's just barely behind Minneapolis-St. Paul on this measure.  But it's barely worth quibbling over numbers here, since it's not at all clear to me why it matters what share of in-city households have kids.  Some cities attract and hold families with kids; some don't.  It depends on a lot of factors -- the amount of single-family housing in the city; the size and density of the city; median incomes; poverty levels; the age and education levels of the population; whether empty-nesters choose to move out of their urban homes; you name it. (I doubt that the alleged "high level of self esteem" among Portland's residents has any role at all here.) And as Kotkin points out, lots of people move to the suburbs to have kids, for all sorts of reasons.  So how does this make Portland a bad city, exactly?
   
   
4. And this..."As regulation helped boost the housing prices in the close-in areas, the middle class has moved farther and farther out. It turns out that most families -- yes, they still exist -- usually opt not to raise their kids inside sardine cans if they can at all help it."  This isn't even wrong -- it's just incoherent.  You see, Portland can deal with its population influx--resulting from its deserved reputation for quality of life--in one of two ways.  It can accept more density by building more multi-family housing within the city, for example by letting developers turn existing single-family homes into duplexes, condos, apartment complexes or row houses.  Or it can prohibit density by stopping new construction, which would cause the price of the existing housing stock to rise as demand for housing outstrips supply.  Either way, lots of middle-income families with kids will choose to move to the suburbs, either to seek a different combination of amenities, or lower prices. But in Kotkin's view, these basic market dynamics--more people competing for a finite amount of land--somehow prove that Portland is kid-unfriendly, narcissistic, and over-regulated.  (Maybe if Portland could just make some more land, everyone could get a big house and a big green lawn at a reasonable price, all within city limits -- and a pony!!)

I could go on (and on) about Kotkin's whine, but I'll stop here -- except to note one thing.

A few years back, Portland contrarian Wendell Cox (one of Kotkin's sources for the article) held an anti-smart growth conference for conservative think tanks and funders.  From what I read the conference was, in essence, a training session for how to vilify smart growth.  The advice:  don't engage on the substance -- because that gets sidetracked into a discussion of what kind of communities we collectively want to create, which is smart growth's strongest turf.  Instead, the best way to stop smart growth is to tar its advocates as latte-sipping, brie eating urban elites who look down on ordinary Americans, are opposed to freedom of choice, and want to tell everyone else the how and where to live.

Kotkin's op-ed seems to flip this general strategy on its head.  Now it's Kotkin and his ilk who are looking down on people who've freely chosen to live in Portland -- they're narcissistic and self-important, and insufficiently interested in bearing children and building strip malls, Walmarts, and factories. 

So who's the sneering elitist now?

Toward a Biodiversity Accounting

It's no secret that native biodiversity is on the ropes, in the Northwest and around the world. And because we frequently care so deeply for the places and species that we love, we tend to make conservation decisions with our hearts but not our heads. I don't believe for a moment that passion isn't important for conservation, but better information about the most severe threats may be even more important.

So it's a good first step that a number of conservation scientists recently published an roster of 794 species that are not only on the brink of extinction but, even worse, are hanging on in only a single location. By mapping these critical places--there are 595 of them--we can get some sense about where to direct our conservation resources in order to protect species from vanishing altogether.

 

Of course, this map, and other biodiversity "hotspot" maps shouldn't be the last word in conservation decisions. A number of other factors must be included in the accounting. Among them, how likely (or capable) is the host country of actually protecting conservation areas? Are there distinct evolutionary lineages that are at risk? Is it very expensive to conserve land in some areas? Is it possible to protect entire intact landscapes in some places and not others? And there are many more, I'm sure.

But still--though many questions still need answering--this map is a good step toward helping conservationists make wise investments. (Read fuller coverage in the the New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)

Cascadia's Sword of Damocles

One of the wonderful things about living in Cascadia is the sense that the earth beneath our feet is very much alive. This is a land of volcanoes, hotsprings, and earthquakes--a place where geology is no distant abstraction. Even the region's name, Cascadia, is shared with a large subduction zone in the north Pacific where one continental shelf is sliding beneath another.

Yet in spite of everything, and apart from a few expensive seismic retrofits and construction projects, we Cascadians are pretty glib about our potentially catastrophic footing. But we can live in tranquil ignorance no longer: a fascinating new book blends history and geography to tell the story of a tsunami that struck Japan in 1700. The cause? A huge earthquake in Cascadia--estimated between a magnitude 8.7 and 9.2--that sent floods rippling across the Pacific. 

We're all too familiar with the horrifying effects of big earthquakes--the Southeast Asian tsunami and the recent earthquake in Pakistan. But what would happen if a similar sized quake struck again in Cascadia? And what lessons can we learn from the history of the Northwest before it was inhabited by Europeans? Well, I've just now cracked the cover but I'm about to find out. And if you're looking for a Christmas gift for a geeky naturalist type, check out The Orphan Tsunami of 1700.

To Save a Species, Shoot Here

From the wilderness of British Columbia comes an innovative conservation tactic about which I am strongly... ambivalent. Raincoast Conservation Foundation is acquiring the guide-outfitting hunting rights to five areas along the central BC coast, a remote area of vast wilderness that is home to the rare "spirit bear," among other species. The angle here is probably obvious: Raincoast bought the rights in order to put a stop to hunting.

Raincoast and other conservation groups have a strong interest--one that I share--in protecting biodiversity and relatively pristine wild places. So what's my beef? It's a two-parter.

First, I'm not sure that hunting is bad for the species being hunted. Second, I'm not sure the price--Can$1.35 million plus annual licensing fees--is the best conservation use of the money.

Now on one level, hunting is obviously bad for a species because it involves, well, killing it. But the formula isn't really so simple. For at least two reasons, hunting can actually be beneficial. First, hunters often form powerful constituencies supporting conservation. Ducks Unlimited, a powerful voice for wetlands protection, is probably the best-known example, but it's worth remembering that National Wildlife Federation also first took root in the hook and bullet crowd. Just as hikers often become advocates for trails, hunters and fishermen often become advocates for protecting their recreation. In the Northwest, for instance, you can find plenty of farmers who don't care much for salmon regulations, but you can't find a single steelhead fisherman who doesn't get animated about water quality.

Second, as globe-trotting naturalist David Quammen argues in his recent book Monster of God, hunting can actually be the lifeline that rescues species from the brink of oblivion. In the Russian far east, India, Australia, and Romania, Quammen finds compelling evidence that hunting of the most objectionable sort--big game trophy hunting of endangered species by well-heeled foreigners--can spell the difference between life and death.

The reason is depressingly venal: a lot of money gets spent to bag a saltwater croc or a Siberian tiger. When done right, some of the money gets ploughed back into habitat conservation. But by far the biggest benefit, according to Quammen, is that locals see a direct, tangible (read: cash money) benefit  for conserving that species. And without local protection imperiled species are all too often victimized by poaching or habitat destruction. To localize Quammen's reasoning, the perpetual specter of logging in coastal BC is a far more pernicious threat than hunting.

So hunting, which creates a conservation constituency and provides a financial incentive, is not unequivocally bad for biodiversity. Indeed, I suspect that on balance it's actually a boon. But hunting also doesn't sit well with many environmentalists who are, for perfectly legitimate reasons, ethically opposed to gratuitously killing animals. And I must admit, I have a hard time keeping my blood pressure down when I think about certain kinds of hunting, especially of big predators like grizzlies, cougars, and wolves. When I think that those emblems of wildness may wind up as adornments of faux masculinity in a Texas drawing room, I get positively pissed off. But still, that doesn't mean hunting is a bad deal for biodiversity.

Raincoast and other conservation groups argue that ecotourism can supplant hunting. Ecotourism, they argue, can infuse cash into the region and create a constituency just as hunting is alleged to do. Perhaps it can. Indeed, recent studies in the US show that Americans spend more money watching wildlife than fishing or hunting for it. But ecotourism, despite its green appellation, can also carry tremendous environmental consequences--everything from carbon emitted by many people traveling to remote locations to habitat-destroying development to keep pace with the hoped-for crowds. (Some other time I'll write a post about my deep suspicions of ecotourism as a silver bullet for conservation.)

Moreover, I don't see why BC can't reap the benefits of both ecotourism and sustainable limited-tag hunting. So while ecotourism confers many benefits, I don't see why hunting can't add more.

Finally then, there's the question of whether $1.35 million plus annual fees is worth the benefit. Owning up to opportunity costs can be a painful choice when it comes to protecting places and animals that we love, but it's even more painful for the wilderness when we choose poorly. The model Raincoast is using--buying a license and holding it for conservation--is a good one. It's been done with increasing success with water rights (keeping water in streams for fish), grazing rights (keeping livestock off fragile public lands that need breathing room to recover), and development rights (buying easements on farms, for instance, to prevent them from subdividing).

Hunting rights have even been purchased before too, though never on the scale that Raincoast is doing it. But unlike rights for water, grazing, timber, minerals, or development, the biodiversity threats of hunting rights are far less clear. I would like to know what else might have been accomplished with that money. How many acres of land could have been protected from impending habitat-destroying development? How much logging could Raincoast have prevented with that money? And how much logged-over land could have been restored?

The conservation world needs a steely-eyed list that prioritizes the ecosystems and species that are most imperiled. (More on that list tomorrow.) And then it needs an even more steely-eyed accounting of the costs of protection. What are the best buys? What are the investments that are most stable, most leveraged, most likely to reap benefits in the future? As far as I know, that accounting has never been done, but I have a strong suspicion that hunting rights would probably pencil out as a rather bad buy.

Gas Fees: The Good, The Bad, and The Curious

I'm not sure, exactly, whether this news is promising or disappointing: the San Jose Mercury News reported last week that environmental advisers to Governor Schwarzenegger are calling for a new fee on gasoline that would help pay for incentives to reduce climate-warming emissions.

The good news here is that they're considering fees on gasoline in the first place. 

The bad news is that the proposed fees are tiny -- just 2.5 cents per gallon, which isn't enough to affect consumption more than a nominal amount.

The good news is that the fees will go to a good cause: there are a lot of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions, so the fees, as small as they are, could do a lot of good -- especially considering that California uses about 15 billion gallons of gasoline per year, so a 2.5 cent per gallon fee would raise $375 million per year. 

The bad news is that opponents are already up in arms, blasting the idea as an unnecessary new tax on gas.

Of course, there's also a curiosity here that's worth noting.  The proposed gasoline fees are similar to the "public goods charge" already levied on electricity bills.  But it seems as though the outrage about new "taxes" is largely reserved for gasoline; fees on electricity get a pass.  Which suggests that gasoline holds a special place in the American psyche -- we pay close attention to anything that can make gas prices go up, but let similar price increases in other parts of the economy slide by unnoticed. 

One possible explanation for this is that we're a car oriented culture, and that we've come to prize cheap, unlimited mobility.  I think that's only partially true.  To me, it seems that we pay so much attention to the cost of gas because it's the only commodity whose price is regularly and consistently advertised on busy streets. Day to day, most people get much more information about gas prices -- which stations have cheap gas, what the recent price trends have been -- than about anything else they buy.  The way that gas is advertised has made us super-attentive to its price. 

Which makes me wonder what the world would be like if the harmful side effects of gasoline (money shipped out of the local economy; greenhouse gas emissions; cost of foreign entanglements; etc.) were advertised as broadly as its price.

Young at Heart

I'm not sure what to make of this, but it's interesting anyway:   Young and Restless in a Knowledge Economy (pdf document), a report on how different urban areas around the US have fared in attracting new residents who are young and well educated. 

Now, the report's author clearly believes that attracting talented and entrepeneurial 25-to-34 year olds is a key determinant of a city's economic vitality--a perspective that I'm not entirely sure that I share.  (I think, for example, about this Brookings report that shows that cities can have little population growth but plenty of economic growth, as measured by income per capita.) 

Be that as it may, the report has a couple of very interesting nuggets about Seattle and Portland.  First, central Seattle (or, really, Seattle within a 3 mile radius of the central business district) saw the fastest population growth rate for young adults of any major city the authors looked at.  Between 1990 and 2000 the number of residents between the ages of 25 and 34 in and around downtown Seattle grew by more than a quarter.  This is especially striking since this group includes the "baby bust" generation born during the low-fertility years of the early 1970s; nationally, the absolute number of people in that age range fell over the decade, as the baby boomers aged and were replaced by the baby busters.  (For example, outside of a 3 mile radius from downtown Seattle, the late-20's to early-30's population in the greater Seattle area fell by 5 percent.)  So the bigger demographic trends make the concentration of young people in Seattle all the more remarkable.

This trend -- Seattle attracting lots of young adults -- shows itself in other ways as well.  In 1990, 25-to-34 year olds were slightly more likely than the average Seattle resident to choose a home close to downtown.  But by 2000, they were much, much more likely to choose a home near the city center.  Among the cities the report considers, only in Chicago do young people show a greater predilection for living in or near downtown.

Now for Portland.  The city ranked third, behind Seattle and Denver, in attracting young adults to the urban core; the population of 25-to-34 year olds in the neighbhorhoods surrounding the city center grew by a little over 20 percent. But Portland's suburbs also did surprisingly well in attracting young people.  In fact, metropolitan Portland ranked 3rd among all cities in its "relative attractiveness" to young adults -- the 25-to-34 demographic grew 9 percent faster than the population overall, despite the fact that nationwide the absolute numbers of people in that age group fell.

Much has been made about how few kids there are in Northwest cities.  (A year ago, the "fact" that there are more dogs than kids in Seattle made the rounds -- with some interesting discussion in David Sucher's City Comforts blog.)  And there's more than a grain of truth here -- there really aren't a lot of kids in the city limits of Portland and Seattle, relative to the to total size of the population.  This report may give some clues about why that's so.  Well educated women tend to have children later in life; and many of the new young adults in Portland and Seattle have completed 4 year college degrees.  So even though Seattle and Portland have attracted lots of people in their peak childbearing years, they seem to have been particularly attractive to precisely the kinds of people who delay childbearing, or who choose to have smaller families. 

Which leads to an apparent irony -- the very same trend that some folks are treating as a harbinger of economic growth is causing others to wring their hands over the "childlessness" of the cities.  But for my part, I'm not sure that these trends are worth celebrating or condemning. They just are.

Toxic Whales

BBC News reports that orcas are the most toxic-contaminated mammals in the Arctic. Fat samples recently taken from killer whales in a Norwegian fjord revealed startlingly high levels of pesticides, PCBs, and flame retardants.

Whales in the Arctic may be somewhat more susceptible because toxics often concentrate in the polar regions, but the Norwegian whales are a reminder that the southern resident orcas of Cascadia are also sickened by high levels of toxics. And unlike their Arctic brethren, the whales of BC and Washington are next door neighbors to millions of people and our heavy industry. All those increasingly banned and phased-out flame retardants persist in the environment where they can continue to poison both people and wildlife.

As we begin to plan for protecting the southern residents under the Endangered Species Act, perhaps we should consider testing the southern residents for toxics in a systematic way. The last time one of the southern residents was tested for PCBs (a dead whale that had washed ashore) it registered perhaps the highest levels of contamination ever measured in a killer whale--so high that the machines had to be re-calibrated. Not only would tests help us prioritize the most critical threats to orcas, but their levels of contamination may give us clues about how vigilant we ought to be about toxic-laden consumer products.

Sustainability's Slow-motion Revolution

What makes the impossible become inevitable? History shows that an unarguable principle and a small corps of dedicated people can slowly but surely change the course of the future.

Today, NEW is publishing a year-end essay by executive director Alan Durning that applies history's lessons of social change to the Northwest's movement toward sustainability—a healthy, lasting prosperity grounded in place. In the piece, he sets the campaign for a sustainable economy and way of life beside similarly ambitious causes of the past, such as emancipation and suffrage, finding reason for optimism.

We’d like to hear from Cascadians about your work in sustainability and what keeps your optimism afloat. Click here to read Alan Durning’s essay and then join the discussion below.

Prius, Oil, and Time

Gristmill's ur-pundit David Roberts makes a good point concerning this post, discussing whether buying a Prius or other super-efficient vehicle really reduces climate-warming emissions.  What Dave is wrestling with is whether the oil "saved" by driving a Prius is really just bought by someone else -- leading to no net reduction in overall emissions. 

A few things to say here.  First, as astute commenter Patrick Niemeyer notes, the Prius has other benefits besides using less fuel -- it's also a phenomenally clean car.  Driving a Prius reduces your overall emissions of smog-forming compounds, particulate matter, and volatile organics.  For cars, cleanliness is, quite obviously, a good thing.

But that doesn't really get to the heart of Dave's point -- which is that super-efficient cars may ultimately be irrelevant if all the oil gets burned sooner or later.  I still think that's not quite right.  By reducing aggregate demand for transportation fuels in any given year, cars like the Prius offer a couple of clear, tangible benefits to the climate.

Let's say that for every 10 gallons of gas you save by driving a Prius, demand for gasoline from the global transportation system falls by six gallons -- that is, six gallons of gas aren't used in a given year, and are either placed in storage or not pumped out of the ground.  Now, of course, that gasoline may be burned next year, or the year after that.  But the pace at which carbon is emitted to the atmosphere does matter:  the longer the GHGs are in the atmosphere, the more heat they trap.  Delaying carbon emissions may reduce the pace of climate forcing, and buy a little time to deal with the consequences.

Which suggests reducing aggregate demand for transportation fuels can slow, however slightly, the pace of climate change. Which is a good thing.

The second benefit stems from this fact:   all else being equal, reducing aggregate demand for transportation fuels will reduce the price of oil.  And lower prices reduce the incentive to pull more oil out of the ground. 

For the "easy oil" -- the stuff that gushes from the ground, or can be coaxed out without too much trouble -- this probably doesn't matter.  (If you can produce a barrel of oil for under $10 with current technology, it's a pretty sure bet that it will get used up sooner or later.)  But for the hard oil -- stuff that takes a lot of technology, effort, and energy to produce -- price matters a lot.  Oil from, say, Alberta's tar sands might be extremely profitable to extract when oil's at $60 per barrel, but a money sink if oil prices fall below $40 per barrel.  Producing the really difficult oil is an especially big climate problem, since it often takes a lot of energy (and climate-warming emissions) to do so.

Now, if prices rise and people think they'll stay high, a lot of the relatively hard oil will get produced -- and sooner rather than later. And there's a huge supply of "hard" oil in the world.  By reducing demand, you make it less economically feasible to extract the really costly oil -- which reduces, or at least delays, the climate impacts of the transportation system.

Of course, it could be that, super-efficient cars or no, the world's "easy" oil will be used up eventually; and following that, prices will rise, and we'll start extracting the stuff that's harder to get at.  And it's even feasible to argue that it's better to face that day of reckoning sooner rather than later -- we'll have to face the music sometime. 

Nevertheless, a world of hybrid cars will probably come to that juncture, with all of the world's easy oil already tapped, a little bit later than it otherwise would; and it might--just might--prevent some of the really difficult oil from being produced at all -- especially if renewable energy technologies get more cost- and energy-efficient in the interim. 

To me, either result -- slowing the pace of global warming emissions, and/or keeping some hard-to-extract oil in the ground -- would be a boon for the climate.   Whether it's a cost-effective way to get to that benefit is a question for another time.

Of Green Mayors and Red Queens

Not much new here, really, but still worth noting: from the Seattle P-I, "Seattle sets own Kyoto goals for emissions."

To me, the thing that's most noteworthy is the admission that, if greenhouse gas emissions are really going to fall in a city like Seattle, a lot of the reduction will have to come from the transportation sector.  Seattle's electricity is already, at least nominally, climate-neutral.  Some gains can probably be made in industrial energy efficiency, and in buildings heated with gas or oil.  But the big story is likely to be in highway transportation:  cars, trucks, and buses.

Which leads to a few thoughts.  First, Nickels is making a risky promise, since it's pretty hard for a city -- with its relatively limited range of policy tools -- to get people to use less gasoline and diesel fuel.  The city government can ramp up the efficiency of its own vehicle fleet, including buses.  But that only goes so far; the large majority of the transportation fuel in the city is consumed by private vehicles. 

And while the city can take lots of steps to foster more compact, transit- and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods -- which are generally far more fuel efficient than sparsely populated suburbs -- it's probably going to have to attract lots of new residents to do so.  (You can't create a dense neighborhood without adding people.)  But that puts the city in a bind: adding new residents could add to the city's emissions tally, even as creating compact neighborhoods reduces it.  So in terms of total (not per capita) emissions, the city could wind up running faster and faster to stay in one place -- kind of like the Red Queen in Alice and Wonderland.

The city is making its goals all the more difficult to reach, given its support for some major road projects (replacement of the Viaduct with a tunnel, plus widening the SR-520 bridge across Lake Washington).  If the transportation planners are correct, bigger roads will generate more car trips (that's what they're for, after all).  Increased traffic capacity comes with benefits as well as costs, of course; but one of the costs is to make it a lot harder to meet Mayor Nickels's emissions goals.

Of course, there are some things that the city can do to encourage people to drive less.  But most of them have to do with making it more expensive to drive -- tolling roadways in the city, taxing parking, and the like.  Those are reasonable policy options -- there are cities in the world that do those sorts of things.  But they'll be tough to pass in what is, to a large extent, still a car-oriented metropolic.

My second big thought here is that -- perhaps -- Seattle shouldn't focus on reducing climate-warming emissions from within the city itself.  This isn't necessarily an obvious point, and there may be no easy way to make this happen in practice.  But there could be easier, and more cost effective, means to reduce such emissions outside the city than inside it.  For example, Seattle city light could work with other utilities in the region to help them become climate neutral.  That could make a big difference to the region's net climate impact -- but it's not the same thing as reducing Seattle's own emissions, which is apparently the bar that the mayor has set for the city.

The mayor's set the city a big task, and I applaud him for it.  But it's going to be tough going -- it'll require a lot of creativity, and perhaps some creative accounting, to get the job done.

Deadweight and New Ideas

A few days ago the New America Foundation's Fiscal Policy Program came out with a proposal to completely re-engineer (pdf link) the federal tax system in the United States.  I'm not enough of a tax geek to cast judgment on the specifics, but some of the details look very intriguing.  In particularly the idea of "environmental taxes" -- taxing, say, global warming emissions, or natural resource consumption, or pollution -- makes a lot of sense.

We've written about this before -- seemingly ad nauseum -- but it's still an idea worth mentioning again.  When you tax something, you get less of it.  Economists call it a "deadweight loss."  For example, with a sales tax people buy a little less than they otherwise would; with an income tax, people generate a little less income.  And so on. 

The problem with many taxes is that they fall on things that, as a general matter, we want more of (income, for example) while sparing things that we want less of (e.g., pollution, oil dependence, and the like).  Pollution taxes don't have that problem: they tax what we want to get rid of.  The deadweight loss works to reduce pollution -- so the tax actually makes people's lives better.

And in addition to creating a new revenue stream that can be used for all sorts of other purposes (including, potentially, lowering other taxes), environmental taxes also would have this side benefit:  we spend less on cleaning up our messes, less on health care, and less on all the other things that go along with a polluting economy.  So, for instance, if we substantially raised fuel taxes we'd buy less gas -- and we'd also have cleaner air, less climate-warming emissions, fewer car accidents, and (possibly) less reason to get entangled in costly foreign adventures.  All of those things tend to reduce the need for government spending -- which means that pollution taxes can help raise revenue and reduce outlays at the same time.  Neat!

Now, for some criticism of the proposal:  boy, is it dry.  Obviously, there's a place for dry.  But with all of the work and attention that's been paid to "framing" policy debates -- that is, discussing policy in ways that appeal to people's pre-existing values and ideals -- you'd think that the basic statement about their policy approach would have been couched in more inspiring language.  Their first bullet point -- "Replace payroll taxes with a progressive consumption tax" -- is simply incomprehensible if you don't know what they're talking about already.  And the language itself gives people precious little reason to bother to find out.  Maybe "Boost wages and encourage saving." 

I don't know...maybe I'm not so good at this stuff either, but I still think it's worth paying very, very close attention to.  The lessons of the past decade or so show that you can't hope to win a policy debate based only on the merits of the policies themselves.  You've got to explain yourselves in a compelling way.  And this, to my mind, falls short.

PBDEs: Another Nail

Some cheery news for Monday:  The Olympian, Washington's capital city newspaper, reports that the state departments of ecology and health are proposing further steps to eliminate PBDEs, a toxic flame retardant, from commerce.  And I imagine that some state legislators are paying close attention to those recommendations as they gear up for the legislative session next January.

Just to recap -- PBDEs are flame retardants used in furniture foams and plastics, but have some disturbing similarities to their chemical cousins, the PCBs.  Both classes of compounds have been found to affect neurological development in lab animals, and PCBs are known to cause developmental delays and deficits in children.  Scientists routinely find PBDEs in samples of food, housedust, and human breastmilk and body fat -- and levels in North America, where the use of the most troublesome forms of the compound has been concentrated, are the highest in the world.

Last year the Washington legislature funded a PBDE action plan for the state, but delayed action on a bill to actually remove compounds out of commerce.  Meanwhile, the manufacturer of the kinds of PBDEs most often found in people's bodies has stopped manufacturing the compounds, under an agreement with the US EPA.  Still, one type of PBDEs are still used widely in commercial electronics and other applications (though, apparently, many manufacturers have managed to remove all PBDEs from their supply chain).

Today's news means, in essence, that departments of health and ecology are leaning towards a more comprehensive ban of PBDEs.  As summarized by the Olympian:

The two agencies recommend that the Legislature:
• Ban the manufacture, distribution or sale of new products containing Penta or Octa [which are the most problematic forms of the compounds].
• Ban the use of Deca [the PBDEs that are still in widespread use] in electronic components, as long as safer fire retardants are available or if additional studies show that Deca harms human health.
• Consider a ban on Deca in products that don’t already contain it, but could in the future, including textiles and mattresses.
• Continue research on PBDE alternatives and monitor the levels of PBDE in the environment.

These are all good steps.  Of course, it would have been nice if the same level of caution had been exercised before PBDE contamination became so widespread.

When Fake News Is Real News

Because of our work on PBDEs -- the flame retardant chemicals that are showing up at alarming levels in northwesterners' bodies -- I've set up a Google alert that lets me know whenever something new is published that contains the word "PBDE".  I was hoping to keep abreast of new scientific findings, or maybe new policy developments that I might not otherwise get wind of.  But most of what I've gotten has been just P.R. announcements -- fake news stories, really -- from companies crowing that they've phased PBDEs out of their products. Just today, for example, Hewlett-Packard announced that they've already gotten rid of PBDEs from their plastic electronics casings, and are soon to phase out another brominated flame retardant.

Right now, I'd say that the industry P.R. makes up the large majority of the PBDE news that Google sends me in any given week.

At first, I found the stream of P.R. annoying.  But now I realize that, far from being junk, the steady drip of PR news has become a real story in itself.  It wasn't long ago that the electronics industry was begging for exemptions from PBDE phaseouts, saying that they simply didn't have any viable alternatives to the compounds.  But, apparently, the engineers have had a chance to do some tinkering, and are finding that they can get along well enough without them.

Which suggests that getting rid of PBDEs completely may be a lot easier than the industry lobbyists had predicted.  Which should come as little surprise.  Time and again, industrial engineers have shown that they've got the creativity to solve pollution problems quickly and cost effectively.  Sometimes, all it takes is to give their higher-ups a little kick in the pants.

Baby Boomer Housing Boom?

By virtue of its size, the baby boom generation influenced consumer trends at each stage of its life cycle. When boomers were younger, suburbs expanded to house all the new (and larger) families. But now that boomers are reaching their senior years, developers should recognize their new housing needs: smaller homes with better access to services.

Census projections suggest that in the next twenty five years Cascadia will gain nearly 2.2 million seniors, an increase of over 115 percent. In contrast, the youth population (below age 15) will increase by only 806 thousand, or around 28 percent (see chart).

These aging baby boomers will need a different type of housing from when they were younger.

Without kids to raise, boomers won't need as much space. And as they age, they may neither want nor be able to take care of a large house and yard, let alone a McMansion. Aging also reduces mobility so seniors often need alternative transportation, such as buses or dial-a-ride. It also helps to have nearby shops and services.

Dense, mixed-use developments inside cities and towns (instead of on the suburban fringe) can meet these needs. An apartment that's easy to clean and has a building manager to maintain, a nearby bus stop with frequent service, and neighborhood shops all serve the booming senior generation and can help keep them independent longer.