Isaac Laquedem

The Lexington plane crash: a cheap and easy fix

The cause of this week's tragic airplane crash in Lexington, Kentucky that killed 49 of the 50 people on board appears to have been very simple.  The pilot turned onto the wrong runway and started to take off, unaware that the plane was on the wrong runway and the runway was 1500 feet too short for the plane.

Wrong-runway accidents are rare, but it occurred to me that this one might have been avoided if the airport had marked the runway with its length.  The pilot and co-pilot would have had a chance to notice that the runway was only 3500 feet long instead of the 7000 feet of the airport's main runway, and then realized that they had made a mistake.

Isaac's modest suggestion:  encourage airports to mark their runways -- or at least all but their longest runway -- at each end with the runway length, to provide one more chance for a wrong-runway pilot to catch his or her error before trying to take off on a runway that is too short.  Another fifty dollars of paint on the runway might have saved 49 lives.

Martin, Barton, and Fish

I should have noted, three weeks ago, the 118th anniversary of the birth of Bruce Barton (1888-1967), who in his long and varied life served in Congress, founded and ran a major advertising agency, and wrote a famous religious book, The Man Nobody Knows, that portrayed Jesus as a salesman and advertising agent. 

Mr. Barton had one more claim to fame, though he might have done without it; he was one of the three Republican congressmen lampooned by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election as the obstructionists to the New Deal.  President Roosevelt punctuated his speeches that year with jabs at the isolationist Republicans, ending each paragraph with the line (you have to imagine his chirpy cadence here) "Martin, Barton, and Fish."  He would repeat the line to the general rhythm of "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" until the audience joined in the chant.  He outcampaigned his opponent, Wendell Willkie, but the serendipitous euphony of the Republican House leadership didn't hurt.  Or, in verse:

Martin, Barton and Fish

Were very Republican-ish.

Martin, the speaker, wielded the gavel,

Barton at Roosevelt often did cavil,

Fish said the New Deal was bound to unravel,

Yet FDR couldn't possibly wish

For occupants of the Republican niche

More useful than Martin and Barton and Fish.

The family farm is already saved

One of the Republican talking points this year seems to be that Congress should repeal the estate tax in order to save the family farm.  The argument goes that heirs of farmers are forced to sell their parents' farms to pay estate taxes. 

A number of sources (possibly all quoting one another) say that they haven't heard of a case where the family farm had to be sold to pay estate taxes.  The Congressional Budget office reported that in the year 2000, 4,649 estate tax returns were filed for deceased farmers, of which 1,659 owed estate tax.  Only 138 of those estates (about 3% of the total) reported having less in liquid assets than the amount of the tax.

I don't think many people would begrudge reducing the estate tax to allow more farmers to leave their farms to their children to continue farming, but the estate tax doesn't seem to be getting in the way of farmers doing just that, and Section 2032A of the Internal Revenue Code already gives farmers an estate tax break on up to $820,000 of value in the farm.  If the anti-estate-tax forces are serious about protecting the family farm, why not exclude from estate taxation the first $5,000,000 or so of value in the family farm, subject to the condition that the heirs continue to farm the land for five years after the farmer dies?  The current proposal seems more directed at protecting estates in the Hamptons than in the hayfields.

A note to my sister

Happy birthday, L.J.!

A proposal for TriMet to triple its money

Also, I'd like to buy the Butler Block from TriMet.  I'll pay triple what the Allegro developers have offered -- the Laquedemitasse will go halvesies with me on the $3 purchase price -- and I'll commit to buying 1000 all-zone rail tickets a month for the next 10 years.  I figure I can make a decent profit by continuing to operate the parking lot and selling the excess FAR from the site (6 to 1 on 27,500 square feet, worth about $1,600,000) to the owner of the property next door.  Any takers?

Why the City of Portland can't restrict FAR transfers any more

The Butler Block / Allegro Condominium Tower story (see my previous post) gave me an idea tonight.  (My drinking companion remarked on the dangerous glint that came into my eye when the idea struck.)

Portland's zoning code allows developers to acquire unused floor area ratio ("FAR") from landmarks, and from other properties in the same recognized neighborhood or within two miles.  I think these are recent changes to the zoning code.  I surmise that the City will eventually realize that it's been overgenerous with these transfers and will amend the code to limit these transfers. 

Let's say that I can buy an underdeveloped site, maybe a small building that isn't redevelopable by itself, but which has FAR of 9 to 1 and is using only 3 to 1.  On a 10,000 square foot site near the city center, the market price for the FAR appears to be about $10 per square foot, which means that the 60,000 unused square feet of FAR has a market value of about $600,000.  That might -- mind you, I say might -- be almost what I pay for the building.

Now when the City amends the zoning code to restrict my ability to sell this FAR to the highest bidder, it's reduced the value of my property by $600,000, because I can't sell the FAR any more.  Here comes my Measure 37 claim, as I ask the City to pay me the amount by which its code change has devalued my property.  The City can't afford to pay me and the other claimants, and as I see it the City may be locked into its bad policy decision because it can't afford to change it.

TriMet offers a lucky developer a 99.998% discount on the Butler Block

The Portland Tribune's story today about the TriMet parking lot at SW 18th Avenue and Salmon Street, which TriMet now wants to sell for $1 to a developer, told only part of the history of this interesting piece of property.  As the story points out, the City of Portland required TriMet to provide off-street parking to replace the on-street parking that was removed from SW 18th Avenue to make room for light rail.  This lot, known as the "Butler Block" to the old-line cognoscenti, was a public parking lot in private hands; TriMet condemned it and turned it into a public parking lot.  Although TriMet ultimately was ordered to pay much more for the Butler Block, and then spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up the soil, its initial offer to the private owner was only $500.  You could say that TriMet is willing to sell the block today for 1/500, or 0.002%, of what TriMet thought it was worth when it offered to buy it ten years ago.  It's enough to make Peter Minuit ask for his $24 back.

Defining planets and affordable housing

A snippet of science news on nomenclature sparked a chain of ideas that took me from the Kuiper Belt to the problem of providing affordable housing in Portland.

Anyone under age 80 grew up learning that the solar system includes nine planets, ranging from Mercury to Pluto.  When it was discovered, astronomers believed Pluto to be about 3600 miles in diameter, more or less comparable to Mercury in size.  Later observations led astronomers to move their estimated downward, and when the Hubble Telescope finally got a good look at the planet, they concluded that Pluto is only 1413 miles across, and its satellite Charon 728 miles across.

The International Astronomical Union is meeting in Prague this month and one topic on the agenda is to define "planet."  One proposed definition is that a planet is any object massive enough for gravity to shape it as a sphere and that orbits a star instead of something else.  Any object of several hundred miles or more in diameter that's spherical and orbits the sun would qualify.  Pluto would stay in the planetary club, but more than forty other objects in the solar system would be admitted, including Charon, a few asteroids, dozens of objects in the Kuiper Belt such as Sedna and Quaoar, and Rush Limbaugh.  (Just kidding about that last one, but he does meet most of the definition.)

All that fuss reminded me of a riddle that Abraham Lincoln used to pose:  "If you called the tail of a dog a leg, how many legs would a dog have?" he would ask.  "Five," the mark would say.  "No," Lincoln would answer, "calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."  Similarly, calling Pluto, or Charon, or Sedna, or Mr. Limbaugh as a planet doesn't make any of them one.

And calling a subsidy program an "affordable housing program" doesn't make it one, unless the result of the program is housing that someone making less than $X can afford, and then someone who actually makes less than $X moves into the housing.  (In Santa Barbara, California, "$X" is $160,000 a year.)  The Oregonian reported that since 1998, the City of Portland has spent $107 million on providing affordable housing, and has with those funds provided 2,212 dwelling units.  Professor Bogdanski points out that this equals $48,372.51 per dwelling unit.  Did these subsidies work?  They certainly helped build the various buildings.  I'd like to suggest, however, that the way to decide if these subsidies worked is not to see how many units were built as a result (though that helps) but to see how many of those units are still owned or rented by low-income households, and if there's a more effective way to spend $48,000 per dwelling to get low-income households into houses and apartments, which is (or should be) the real goal of an affordable housing program.  A subsidized unit that's occupied by a high-income tenant or buyer doesn't help achieve the goal of the program.

For contrast, let's suppose we took $20,000 and lent it to a low-income renter to use to buy the renter's house, with $10,000 going toward the down payment and $10,000 going toward paint and repairs.  The condition is that the $20,000 is a loan secured by a second mortgage on the house, not a gift, and has to be repaid without interest 10 years later or whenever the tenant sells the house.  Some of the loans wouldn't be repaid, but a whole bunch of houses would be painted and fixed up and have first-time homeowners as occupants.  I think a program like this would be more effective at getting low-income households into houses and it would have the side effect of improving some Portland neighborhoods.

Warren Iliff (1936-2006), the man who loved animals

In his memoir Presidents Who Have Known Me, George E. Allen told the story of someone who was nominated to be in charge of the animal shelter (dog pound) of the District of Columbia.  Mr. Allen, a District Commissioner, said that at the gentleman's confirmation hearing, one of the commissioners asked him what qualified him to be in charge of the dog pound.  According to Mr. Allen, the nominee replied, "I don't have any experience, but I'll sure be nice to them dogs."

I like to imagine that Warren Iliff had read that story in his teen years, for he spent most of his adult life being "nice to them dogs," including 12 years (1971 to 1983, though the zoo itself says the years were 1975 to 1985) as director of the Washington Park Zoo in Portland (now called the Oregon Zoo).  Mr. Iliff, who died near Los Angeles on August 6, capped his forty years in zookeeping with a stint as the initial director of the Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach, California. (I stole this 2002 photo of Mr. Iliff in front of the Aquarium from the Long Beach Press-Telegram.)

If you were not in Portland in 1971 then you cannot tell from looking at the zoo today what it was like 35 years ago, when Mr. Iliff came to town.  It was mostly concrete and asphalt.  You might (and I will) uncharitably say that it was designed more for ease in cleaning than to be a good home for the captive animals.  Mr. Iliff began the process to make the zoo a better home for animals, for example by replacing the antiquated outdoor concrete pond and steps that housed the penguins with the larger, temperature-controlled structure their successors inhabit today.  (If memory serves me rightly, the former structure was so bad that at one point the zoo was entirely without penguins, for they had all died.)  What we see today is a direct result of the vision he brought to the zoo in 1971.

And it was a vision laced with humor.  One day Charlie the chimpanzee bit off part of the middle finger of Mr. Iliff's left hand.  Was he angry?  No, he said later, he and Charlie were still friends.  "He's a nice guy," Mr. Iliff explained.  "We had lunch together."

His sense of humor extended outside the zoo also.  One day he asked me, with a perfectly straight face, "Does the name 'Pavlov' ring a bell?"  Another example: when he and his wife Ghislaine moved to Portland and bought a house, they went to the local fire department for some reason, and told a fireman which house they had bought.  The fireman's face lit up (not perhaps the best metaphor) and he enthusiastically told Mr. and Mrs. Iliff about the two fires they had fought in that house in the two or three years before the Iliffs moved there.  Mrs. Iliff was horrified; Mr. Iliff was delighted: he had bought a house with a story to tell.  I've sometimes wondered if he was a little bit disappointed that the house didn't have another fire while he lived there.

Our zoo has progressed a long way from where Mr. Iliff left it, but the seeds of that progress came from his tenure here.  Metro should find some room at the zoo for a suitable memorial to Mr. Iliff.  Naming the Penguinarium after him would be a fine choice.

Before rebuilding West Burnside Street, try the simple fixes first

Before the City of Portland mucks around with turning West Burnside and Northwest Couch into an expensive one-way couplet (an idea first proposed in the mid-1960s, which I think Fred Meyer halted so that he could build his Stadium store), it should try some lower-tech solutions to the Pearl District traffic disaster.  I have two in particular in mind.  First is to convert more of the streets in the district to one-way streets, to reduce the traffic jams caused by cars waiting for oncoming traffic to pass so that they can turn left.  (Start with Couch and Davis Streets.)  Second is to restore the second lane to the two-lane streets that have been converted to one-lane streets over the last several years. (Start with 10th, 12th, 14th, and 16th Avenues.) 

The unhappy fact is that even as the City has encouraged more housing and business in the Pearl District and environs (and any district that includes Le Bouchon can't be all bad), it has systematically reduced the capacity of the streets that serve the district.  A city with more than 100 planners on staff should be embarrassed, or at least slightly abashed, about taking away traffic capacity from the very area to which it's been steering rapid growth.