Daily Score Blog

When in comes to property rights, all eyes are on Oregon as voters there consider trimming back Measure 37. But in some ways, Oregon isn't the most interesting game in town. That honor may belong to Alaska, where voters in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough will weigh 2007's only regulatory takings ballot initiative in the form of Proposition 1.

While the "Mat-Su" isn't known much outside of Alaska, it will be an interesting laboratory for examining the next round of "property rights" arguments. It's likely that activists will try to improve their rhetoric and strategies after their not-terribly-successful outing to the polls in 2006.

I'll have more to say on Proposition 1 in the coming months, but in the meantime you can find good newspaper coverage here and here.

And here the local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersmen, inveighs against the measure in an editorial that appears to have been truncated on the web. Still, I thought there was some apt language, so I'll close with an excerpt:

In this case, one's rights can make a wrong for all. Hogtying the borough, a city or any special district in how it makes public land use policy will result in a chaotic, expensive system no agency could possibly afford.

Oh, I almost forgot: I do have one big criticism of the editorial's language. Prop 1 isn't really a threat to what an "agency" can afford; it's a threat to what the public -- you know, citizens and taxpayers -- can afford.

One of the benefits of working in an office full of geeks is that my colleagues, rather than my spouse, bear the brunt of my obsessions over policy minutiae. A little while ago, for example, we had a rollicking debate about whether Sightline's long-standing opposition to the Home Interest Mortgage Deduction -- herein abbreviated as "HIMD" -- still makes sense.  (We're wild and crazy here, I tell you!)

Here's the rundown.

On equity grounds, the HIMD is crummy social policy.  Most of the benefits go to people who own expensive homes, and whose incomes are high enough that they can benefit by itemizing their deductions.  Worse, the biggest benefits go to the people in the highest tax brackets.  So in essence, the HIMD is ginormous a housing subsidy for the well-off -- and one that dwarfs all of the housing subsidies to lower income folks.  This NY Times article lays out the case nicely:  apparently, half the benefit of the deduction goes to the 12 percent of taxpayers who make at least $100 grand per year.

But the conventional wisdom is that the HIMD isn't just crummy social policy, but crummy environmental policy as well.  Allowing homeowners to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes gives people an incentive spend more of their money on housing than they otherwise would.  And people with extra money to spend on housing tend buy larger homes on bigger lots -- which, in theory at least, means that the HIMD primes the pump for low-density sprawl.  (See, e.g., the photo.)

But not too long ago, we got an email from a guy who wanted to buy a condo in a neighborhood close to downtown -- a modest place where he didn't have to drive much.  (In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, downtown living is about the best you can do, short of ditching your car and going off the grid.)

He argued that, condo prices being what they are, he simply couldn't afford to buy close to the city center without the HIMD.  Take away the interest deduction, and he's got little choice but to stick with a bigger, more energy-hogging house in the 'burbs  (Several of the comments on this thread over at Matthew Yglesias's house make the same point.)

So which is it:  does the deduction accelerate sprawl, by encouraging homeowners to buy more land than they otherwise would?  Or does it temper sprawl, by making homes in expensive, conveniently located neighborhoods more affordable?

I think the answer is both, or possibly neither.

Clark's written a bit recently about the irrationality that afflicts nearly everyone's decisions about energy (see here and here). As a partial antidote, I give you this: Seattle's super-groovy online energy and resource audit.

Basically, you fill out a short survey about your energy habits and your home's characteristics. Then, based on your answers, plus your billing history for electricity, water consumption, and garbage you get a customized report detailing how much your household uses -- and how much it costs you. Better yet, the report also gives detailed suggestions to improve your efficiency.

It even goes so far as to calculate an estimate cost savings for you. For example, installing newer toilets in my house, circa 1943, would save me $13 to $18 per year. But low flow showerheads would net me savings of $31 to $42. So the "payback period" for a showerhead is around one year. Actually, it's no time at all, since Seattle is giving them away for free right now.

What's great about this stuff is that it gets us energy consumers to confront how much we actually pay for our wasteful ways. And when we understand the costs of our consumption, it seems that the costs of our investments in efficiency are pretty darn cheap. Or free. Or they actually put money back in our pockets.

It turns out that the best thing for my greedy self-interest is to do good things for the planet.

The Home Resource Profile, as it's officially called, is open only to folks who are Seattle City Light customers and who have 10 consecutive months of billing history. I'm willing to bet that other cities have similar programs, but I don't know of them. But you know of others, send them to me and I'll post them here.

My house gets a 77 out of 100; my office, a 92. Want to know how walkable your neighborhood is? Or the neighborhood you’re thinking of living in? Go to walkscore.com.

Three Seattle uber-hackers, Jesse Kocher, Matt Lerner, and Mike Mathieu, built this addicting new website. It maps the closest grocery store, restaurant, and several other businesses you might walk to from any address in the United States or Canada. It also gives each location a “Walk Score.” (You can even watch the site tally up the score. It’s awesome!)

What’s especially exciting to me is, Walk Score marks the successful completion of a quest I launched more than a year ago. (It started all the way back in Car-less #2 “One Mile from Home” and continued in Car-less #20 “Googling Google.”)

Yes, walkshed maps are here – and cooler by far than even I imagined. J, M, and M took my idea, improved it, and built the website. Obviously, they’ve got some chops: they claim to have done the project in a couple of weeks.

You don’t have to go farther than Hollywood to see one reason Bicycle Neglect is so rampant in North America. Consider the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The middle-aged protagonist, obsessed with video games and action figures, seems stuck in early adolescence. The film spends two hours lampooning him for being emasculated, immature, not a real man. His vehicle? A bike. (You can almost hear the schoolyard snickers.)
To be a successful adult, apparently, you have to drive. Cycling is for children; cycling is for losers. In this view, it’s fitting that the pinnacle of the sport of cycling is the Tour de France. (Implied snicker about France as a symbol—unfair, of course—of all that’s cowardly, effeminate, and weak.)

Call this Bicycle Shame.

Everyone knows that cars are expensive, right?  Still, it may come as a surprise to find out just how much money we spend getting from place to place.

The cost of the car itself -- typically the second biggest purchase many families make in their lives -- is just the start.  When you start adding in the cost of gasoline, and car insurance, and maintenance and repairs, and parking, and taxes to build new roads and maintain old ones, and license fees, and the medical costs of traffic accidents...boy, I could go on all day...Well, suffice it to say, the zeroes start adding up.

A while back I asked the estimable Yoram Bauman to wade through consumer spending figures to try to figure out how much we actually spend on cars in a year.  Cutting to the chase...

In the Northwest states--Washington, Oregon, and Idaho--about 19 percent of all consumer spending goes towards transportation.  A bit of that pays for planes, trains, and buses, but a whopping 95 percent pays for cars and related expenses.

Think of it this way.  Open up your wallet, or check your bank balance, or look at your last paycheck.  If you're close to average, about one-fifth of all the money you see will go to pay for your car.

Or think of it this way -- maybe you had a rough commute this morning, and spent 20 minutes in traffic.  That's frustrating.  But consider this: for the first hour and a half you spend at work, you're busy working to pay for your car.  Which means that you're spending more time "stuck in traffic" at the office than on the road.

A few days ago I took the long way home from work, biking through Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood. One of the many nice things about riding in Magnolia is the dedicated bike lane painted along the major routes. Not that cyclists need the lane: the streets have ample shoulders and the traffic is usually calm.

But there are a few places in Magnolia where a bike lane would be helpful. Near intersections, for example. Unfortunately, whenever a cyclist might actually need them, the bike lanes disappear. I mean that literally: a few dozen feet before each intersection, the striped bike lane vanishes. Then, 30 feet or so beyond the intersection, it re-appears. 

Those disappearing lanes, I realized on my ride, illustrate perfectly what's wrong with the way we treat cycling: we only provide for bikes where it's easy and doesn't really make any difference. As soon as the going gets tough, planners revert to treating bikes like pariahs, or simply ignoring them.

That sort of historical neglect was why I was thrilled to see Seattle's new master bike plan come to light. Here was a chance to make major upgrades and big, lasting improvements in the way we treat bikes. But just a few months later, I'm losing faith that things will change.

Apropos of my realization that if I bought a new furnace on credit, rather than waiting to save up the cash, I'd have saved a bundle of money over the last 5 years, here's something I've been meaning to write about for months:  a Vancouver developer that came up with a smart financing scheme to build a super-efficient condo complex.

All things being equal, I imagine that most real estate developers don't care one way or the other if their buildings are energy efficient.  If they can make some money by building green -- or at least recoup their costs -- they'll do it.  If they can't, they'll cut corners.  I suppose that a few virtuous souls forgo some profits, say, by installing efficiency features that they can't quite recoup on sale.  But for the most part, the developers are going to follow the profit motive:  if the costs of a super-efficient heating system are higher than home-buyers are willing to pay, the developer is going to skimp.

That'd be fine, if consumers were rational about energy purchases.  But we're not.  In fact, most people's decisions about energy efficiency -- well, mine at least -- are really dopey.  In my case, I was too worried about taking on new debt to realize that utility bill savings would have more than paid for the financing cost of a new furnace.  I could have saved money from day one.  Only myopia prevented me from seeing that.

For a condo-buyer, the problem is similar.  Most prospective buyers are looking for the cheapest possible mortgage -- which means that they undervalue long-term savings on utility bills.  So they're not willing to take on a bigger mortgage for a more efficient heating system -- even if it saves them money in the long run.  (Or, really, even in the short run.)

So what makes this Vancouver developer, reSource Rethinking Building, and their Verdant development, so clever is that they figured out how to get around all that.  They used some innovative financing to make energy efficiency profitable for everyone -- from day one.

Your car's greenhouse gas emissions are about 25 percent worse than you think.

How so? Well, for each gallon of gas you burn in your engine, there's the climate equivalent of another quarter-gallon or so embedded in your consumption. What that means is this: the gasoline you use didn't just magically appear in your tank -- it was extracted, refined, and transported to your local station. And all that activity released emissions.

It's a curiosity of our energy system (and other systems too, such as our food system), but it's a curiosity that bears closely on our thinking about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bear with me for a moment.

It's usually assumed that each gallon of gas releases about 19.5 pounds of CO-2 into the sky. (Some quibble, and argue that it's 19.4 or 19.6. But whatever.)  Basic physics dictates that a gallon of gasoline combusted will release a more-or-less fixed amount of CO-2. But from a public policy perspective, physics isn't the whole story.

The widening gap between the rich and poor is a story that transcends Cascadia's borders. However, northwesterners feel both the positive and negative effects of the trend in a unique way: Some of the richest people in the history of the world live -- or keep second, third, fourth homes -- in our region. Cost of living is soaring in our beautiful cities, especially Vancouver and Seattle. And, at least in Seattle, philanthropy is changing the local economy, with the establishment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Featured on Tidepool today, The Sunday New York Times takes an in-depth look at what the paper calls the "New Gilded Age," and how a new wave of philanthropy is changing the role of government -- and the power of public policy.

Meanwhile, news for your pocketbook: Rents continue to increase and the price of milk is going up too. Oh yeah, and don't forget gas...

And in related news: The Democratic Party is finding success with populism, this time early in the election game. Moreso, John Edwards today embarked on a Poverty Tour -- a la RFK 1968 -- starting in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

(This reminds me more-than-a-bit of a book I read a few years ago, circa November 2004.)

Lastly, a new green campaign, um,  brews on the East Coast: "Sign up for clean energy and get free beer."

A recent study (pdf) by my old friends from the forestry department at OSU finds that when you add up the gains and losses, ecosystems in Oregon stored about 8 million tons of carbon per year between 1996 and 2000. The forests west of the Cascades, in particular, were prodigious carbon sinks. (A carbon sink is basically something that removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases; it’s mostly being stored in trees and soil in this case). 

In case you’re wondering, 8 million tons is a lot of carbon storage.  In fact, it’s enough to offset about half of the state’s total fossil fuel emissions.

Which raises a huge question: given the huge amounts of carbon that Northwest forests can capture and store, what role should they have in climate policy?

There's something energizing about midsummer. If it's not the camping trips, or the afternoon concerts in the park, then it must be the flurry of property rights campaigns gearing up for the fall election.

Here's the latest:

In Oregon, the "Yes on 49" campaign kicked off yesterday. (Measure 49 is the state legislature's referendum that will trim back some portions of Measure 37.) I can't find a website for the "No on 49" campaign, so no link today. But if you want the low-down on Oregon's property rights politics, check out landusewatch, where Peter Bray dishes the dirt with a keen eye for detail.

Media coverage of Measure 49 is here and here.

In California last week, a group of activists began gathering signatures for a new property rights ballot measure that will appear on the 2008 ballot if it qualifies. The initiative appears to concentrate on eminent domain reform (basically, outlawing Kelo-style takings), but leaves regulatory takings alone. This is a departure from California's failed Proposition 90 of 2006.

And while we're on California, the National Institute on Money in State Politics released a report (pdf) revealing that the secretive Howard Rich was responsible for millions of dollars of funding to support Prop 90, as well as ballot measures in other western states. The Sacramento Capitol Weekly has good coverage.

By the way, I haven't vetted any of this stuff: I'm just passing it along to interested readers.

The lastest on Arizona is after the break.

(*Update: Newer and better versions of  these maps are here and here.)

Because I love maps so much that I just can't stop making them.

This version is a bit a more conceptual than the previous map. But even though it's a bit weirder, but I actually like it more because it really drives home the outsize significance of US climate policy.

Each state, or cluster of states, is labelled with a country or continent that has equivalent greenhouse gas emissions.

See the full US map here.

The 291 million in Americans (in 2004) is the greenhouse gas equivalent of the more than 3 billion residents of other countries listed on the map.

The detailed population comparison is below the jump...

We've been meaning to replace our furnace--an old oil heater that was converted to gas back in the 70s--for years. It's big, it's ugly, and worst of all, it's inefficient--so we pay much more for heat than we'd like, even in Seattle's relatively mild winters.

But new furnaces don't come cheap. In fact, some back-of-the envelope calculations a few years back convinced me that it could take nearly a decade before the savings on our gas bills paid for the up-front costs of a new furnace.

In theory, of course, that's still a pretty good investment. After 10 years, we'd stop paying for the furnace, and it would start paying us.

But in practice, we never seemed to be able to save up the cash. Maybe it's my upbringing (my dad was hilariously stingy) but I hated the thought of going into debt, and paying interest and financing costs, just to buy an appliance.

On reflection, though, the fact that we waited to buy a high-efficiency furnace proves one thing: I'm a dolt. You see, if I had financed the furnace -- i.e., bought it on credit, or taken out a homeowners loan to pay for it -- the amount that we saved on utility bills each year would have just about equalled our annual payments. Which means that I could have had a nifty, high-efficiency furnace years ago, without paying a bit more for heat (utilities + financing costs) than I did with our old clunker. Less climate-warming emissions, no extra costs.

Colleen McCrory died last weekend of a brain tumor.

She was among Cascadia's most fearless and successful campaigners for the conservation of our natural heritage -- for the forests, rivers, and islands of British Columbia.

If you weren't blessed to know Colleen, you can read about her here in the Globe and Mail. Her astounding accomplishments as a campaign leader:

"Valhalla Provincial Park, in the Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia;

"Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, in the Queen Charlotte Islands;

"Goat Range Provincial Park, in the Selkirk Mountains;

"Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary, on B.C's central coast;

"Spirit Bear Conservancy, in the Great Bear Rainforest, on B.C.'s central coast.

"In the 1980s, she also persuaded the B.C. government to set up a planning process that would more than double the amount of protected landscape, to 12 per cent of the province."

In some Latin American political movements, when a leader dies, the survivors chant "presente, presente, presente." It's a little thing, like saying "present" or "here" when the roll is called in school. But it means that the leader's spirit is still present among them. It's an injunction to make ourselves worthy of our predecessors--to make our lives amount to as much as theirs did.