Houston is... a big city

First, consider these facts:

• Houston is larger than Los Angeles (but has just over half the population).
• Houston is almost twice as large as New York City (yes, all five boroughs) in land area.
• Into Houston, you could fit...
• Philadelphia, 4.3 times
• Seattle, 6.9 times
• Washington D.C., 9.4 times
• Boston, 12 times

Now, I just want to know how many roads Houston has--as far as just square footage, or even just length. For those of you who ever played SimCity, it reminds me of when you would build too many roads and maybe try lowering road payments under 100%, and the road would start turning into rubble. Yeah. That actually happens somewhere... it's called Houston.

Past that, though, is the question... why is Houston so freaking big? Turns out (not surprisingly) the answer has something to do with Texas annexation laws and such. All the information that follows can be accredited to what I gleaned from a Texas Municipal League document I read on the Web a few weeks back (the TML is pro-annexation, note):

• First of all, there are two kinds of cities in Texas: home rule cities (I think that's what they're called) and other cities (I don't remember the name... general law cities I think). Anyway, point being that home rule cities can make their own ordinances, and general law cities can't.
• But also, home rule cities can annex up to five miles beyond their limits, pretty much whenever--although some laws have made it a bit tougher. The only thing they can't do is annex another home rule city. They have the obligation to provide services within a couple of years to whatever land they annex.
• The point of this (according to TML) is that cities don't get screwed over: they get the tax base of an expanding area, unlike in other metropolitan areas, where these areas would incorporate into suburbs and not give the city any tax revenue, hence making the city a blighted area and downward spiral, etc. (so if this is where we are with annexation, imagine where we'd be without it...)
• TML also states that cities don't really get much revenue from the state government; hence, they need that local tax base to keep going. (I would argue that a probable effect of some of this is to hinder improvements in more well-off areas, whose inhabitants are more able to collectively act and otherwise don't want to pay more taxes to improve poorer parts of town. Hence why the roads suck even in good parts of town--if the city were able to raise taxes to pay for them, that still wouldn't be the infrastructure most in need of work.)
  

Now, what would I say if I were dictator? I'd say that at least some zoning regulations are in order, and the ridiculous growth out should stop in favor of "filling in the gaps," i.e. the vacant lots that are everywhere. But hey, what do I know?

I'm alive!

Really. I'm not dead. However, I am caught in a whirlwind of a tornado of a twister of things, and it's really been enough for me to follow what's going on with the French and Belgian elections and everything over in Gaza, let alone comment or do any sort of strategic analysis. Once July hits, I should have things a little easier.

Few surprises in Spain's autonomic elections

Spain's elections in the Autonomous Communities today produced very little in the way of drama or surprise; indeed, the results were pretty much the same as in 2003. The opposition Partido Popular (PP) did seem to make more gains, relative to the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE), taking a greater percentage in Madrid.

It appears that the only government which may change hands is that in Navarra, where a potential Socialist-Nafarroa Bai-Navarra United Left coalition has won more seats than the local conservative parties. (Nafarroa Bai--"Navarra Yes"--is a combination of the Basque nationalist parties EAJ-PNV, EA and Aralar). However, the ability of these parties to come to agreement is far from certain.

Note that the most volatile Communities, the Basque Country and Catalonia, did not hold elections; neither did Galicia or Andalucia.

Meanwhile, the opposition Partido Popular took the most votes in the municipal elections in all of Spain, with a margin of about 157,000 votes (0.7%). This is a slightly greater margin than the PSOE's victory in the same in 2003, and gives the PP some confidence, as since 1983 the winner of the municipal elections has won the following general election.

The Continental League debuts

Yet another new independent league--the Continental League--made its debut tonight, including in League City, Texas, where the hometown Bay Area Toros faced the traveling-team Texas Heat. The Continental League is one of eight independent leagues to play this year; together, the leagues total 64 teams, including probably the most famous independent team, the St. Paul Saints of Mike Veeck.

The Bay Area Toros are apparently run by a former Rice assistant athletic director; they play their home games at a high school, Clear Creek HS. (This is a larger high-school ballpark than I'm used to in the Northwest; it seats at least 1,000 in its bleachers, though it has no seat backs.) Overall, they seem like a well-run operation.

Tonight's game was well-attended in relation to the stadium, as there were few empty seats. Notably, the focus was on baseball, not on gimmicks; the crowd seemed into the game, and a large percentage stayed until the end of a game that went 10 innings and took almost four hours. The league president was there and went around meeting fans, and overall the environment was very positive. (The quality of play at a glance seemed around Class A ball).

As would be expected, the park was the only real negative. In addition to the lack of seat backs, the park is oriented towards the northwest, meaning some serious glare. A chain-link fence between the backstop and the field interferes with vision. The only real solution is to succeed at the gate and eventually get a new park (as was already discussed a few days ago in the Chronicle).

I'm quite surprised that the Continental League chose to begin play this year, given that it has only three home markets--two in the DFW market, plus League City (situated between Houston and Galveston). The track record isn't good for leagues that begin without at least a few solid home teams. The Houston area, however, would seem ripe for independent league play; in a market of over 3 million, the Astros are the only game in town once NCAA baseball ends.

I meant to provide pictures, but I forgot my camera, so that will have to wait for the next game... perhaps tomorrow.

[Final note for those in the Northwest: Clear Creek HS was attended by none other than Jay Buhner--"the Bone"! There's a name I hadn't heard in a while...]

Update: Hey, it's me on the Toros homepage! Check out this nice pic...

PCL baseball in Reno won't be successful

Looks like there's an agreement to move an unnamed Pacific Coast League team (Tucson? Omaha? New Orleans? Las Vegas?) to Washoe County, aka Reno-Sparks, Nevada. The following are the smallest five PCL markets, plus Reno:

17. Reno, NV, 410,000
16. Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA, 534,000
15. Colorado Springs, CO, 599,000
14. Tacoma, WA, 767,000
13. Albuquerque, NM, 817,000
12. Omaha-Council Bluffs, NE-IA, 823,000

Note the following:

• The Iowa Cubs, with the smallest market in the league, have been quite successfully managed and continue to outdraw their market by the largest ratio. This is an outcome that is by no means guaranteed, and the Midwest is one of the top minor-league regions in the country.
• Colorado Springs and Tacoma are regarded as weak markets.
• Omaha is doing quite poorly.
• Albuquerque, with a renovated stadium and a second chance (after their original Dukes took off), has been supportive--and has almost twice as many people as Reno.
• Nick Lachey is a part-owner of the Tacoma Rainiers (not really relevant, I guess...)
  
• Reno's independent-league efforts have failed, although the Golden League is giving it another shot this year.

All in all, clearly someone thinks this is a good idea, but there were people who thought the West Tenn Diamond Jaxx were a good idea. I'd predict a decent first couple years, followed by a fall-off to attendance near the bottom of the league; to be fair to the PCL, there aren't many good markets left, and with some teams struggling, this may look like the best of the bad options, but you wish that they'd just make things work rather than move into a probably doomed market.

And they say all parties are the same...

Well, maybe. Apparently in April (see El Mundo), the Socialist Party of the Canary Islands (PSC-PSOE) got caught copying the platform of the party Ciutadans (C) of Catalonia. Yes, different parties, from different parts of the country, with pretty much the same platform. It's not just "pretty much the same"... it is the same:

From "125 measures for the first year of a Socialist government: for change in the Canaries" [PDF] (my translation):

We reaffirm the right of the citizens of the Canaries to refer to the Defensor del Pueblo, who is also defender of Canarians; to defend their rights and freedoms when those are threatened by public powers, whether they be autonomic, local or national.

From "100 proposals to improve Catalonia" [PDF] (again, my translation):

We reclaim the right of the citizens of Catalonia to refer to the Defensor del Pueblo, who is also defender of Catalans; to defend their rights and freedoms when those are threatened by public powers, whether they be autonomic, local or national.

The second is the original; the first is the copy. (What, you couldn't tell?). Now, no more comments on how all those politicians are identical!!

This is part of the lead-up to tomorrow's Spanish municipal and autonomic elections--more on those as the results come in.

Farmers Branch: why not STV?

A judge has ruled that the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch cannot enforce its new ordinance against renting apartments to illegal immigrants. The judgment apparently held that the city created its own way of determining whether or not a resident was legal, a responsibility that belongs only to the federal government.

I would be against this ordinance for a couple of reasons: first, because it seems likely to lead to some harassment of people who are legal, but happen to be Hispanic; second, because if all communities adopt similar ordinances, it probably won't cut the number of illegal immigrants, but it could have a very substantively negative impact on the conditions they and their children live in.

What interests me more, however, was further down in the article:

The federal suit, on behalf of three Latino voters who live in Farmers Branch, claims minorities are underrepresented because of the at-large city council system.

It seeks the creation of single-member districts, in which a city council member is elected to represent a specific section of the city. Both large and small cities with diverse racial makeup use the system, said Rolando Rios, the attorney leading the suit.

Activists say if the method had been in place, at least one Latino candidate would have been elected to the council and could represent the group. All five council members are white men.

This assumes that the only or, at least, primary way to represent a voter is by racially descriptive representation. This may be true on this issue, but as the article notes, all five current members of the council are white men. What about women? What about representation on the basis of nonracial issues?

Instead, the plaintiffs would have the city box itself into a racially charged model of electing its City Council by creating seats "reserved" for Latino voters (much like, of course, the U.S. Congress), at the expense of other forms of representation, and at the expense of "disenfranchising" the minority-majority white population in the "Latino" district.

Why not ask, instead of a district model, for a proportional representation model--in particular, the single transferable vote? STV would maintain the system of citywide representation while representing what voters want to see represented.

This is just, of course, a microcosm of the U.S. system in general: if we just took measures to make things more proportional, there'd be no need for ridiculously gerrymandered districts [warning--PDF] to satisfy someone's exclusive concept of "representation." Then the Texas legislators would never have to go to Oklahoma again!

Welsh Assembly MMP: not quite proportional

The results from the Welsh Assembly elections are in, with some interesting results:

Labour - 29.6%, 26 seats (43% of seats)
Plaid Cymru - 21.0%, 15 seats (25% of seats)
Conservative - 21.5%, 12 seats (20% of seats)
Lib Dems - 11.7%, 6 seats (10% of seats)
local independent - 1 seat
others - 16.2%, 0 seats

The facts that most jump out are:
(1) Labour won a disproportionately large share of seats, despite the MMP system, and
(2) Plaid placed ahead of the Conservatives despite a slightly smaller regional vote share.

Both of these issues stem from characteristics of the MMP system that Wales (and Scotland) use for elections. The Welsh system has 60 seats, with 40 elected in single-member constituencies and 20 elected from the five regions (four per region) as compensatory list seats. The two features that lead to the outcomes noted above are:
(1) The system does not compensate for overhangs. Every region has 11-13 seats, of which 4 are compensatory and the rest are from single-member constituencies. Taking South Wales West as an example, Labour won all 7 single-member districts (63 percent of the seats already) but took only 36 percent of the PR vote, meaning it deserved only 5 of the 11 seats. In the version of MMP used by Germany or New Zealand, Labour could keep the 7 seats, but an additional 6 seats would be awarded to other parties, increasing the size of the legislature by two. Not so in Wales (or Scotland)--the extra seats are scrapped, meaning fewer seats for the others.
(2) Compensatory seats are only 1/3 of the Assembly. Enlarging compensatory seats to 1/2 of the Assembly, even if overhangs are still not included, would mostly eliminate the problem.


The overhangs described in (1) give Labour five extra seats in the Welsh Assembly. The big loser was the Conservatives. In the regions where Labour took extra seats in constituencies, the Conservatives were generally the party that lost the compensatory seat which was no longer allocated. This happened in North Wales, South Wales West and South Wales East. (The Lib Dems also lost two seats in this way).

If overhangs were incorporated into the electoral system, the results would have been:
Labour - 29.6%, 26 seats (40% of seats)
Conservative - 21.5%, 15 seats (23% of seats)
Plaid Cymru - 21.0%, 15 seats (23% of seats)
Lib Dems - 11.7%, 8 seats (12% of seats)
local independent - 1 seat
others - 16.2%, 0 seats
The Assembly would be enlarged from 60 to 65 seats.

Labour would still enjoy a disproportionate share of seats, but not by quite a large margin.

Elections for Turkey

The Constitutional Court made its unfortunate, yet predictable, ruling today, "upholding" the secular system by rejecting democracy. The response of PM Erdogan was the election call. In a previous post I noted how the opposition's argument has little actual merit--the New York Times, too, noted that the decision was more political than legal.

Abdullah Gul is the only clear presidential candidate because he is the candidate of a party that holds very close to 2/3 of the seats (the necessary majority). Note that this is possible because of the antidemocratic 10% threshold for the National Assembly. As a result of this threshold, AK took about 65% of the seats with 34% of the votes in the previous election, as only two parties qualified for parliament. This threshold exists because of the fear of marginal Islamist parties.

While AK obviously is on a much different position in the political spectrum from myself, were I Turkish I would support AKP as the best party to lead the country toward full democracy. In fact it is doubtful whether any other party could accomplish this! In this role AKP has been thrust into a liberalizing position, whatever the natural tendencies of its leaders such as Gul and Erdogan. In order to defend their right to be in the political spectrum, AK figures must reach for legitimation to liberal democratic rights--meaning that the Islamist party is (quite effectively) enacting economic reforms needed for EU membership and supporting all-around political reform and liberalization. Quite unlike some other places.

Well, we will see the electorate's opinion soon enough.

Will Canada have a majority government again?

Referring, of course, to a single-party majority government.

I would argue that the days of single-party majority government are permanently over.

A Conservative majority would require the hold on the West to continue, plus about 2/3 of Ontario and half of Quebec. This is the most likely scenario for a single-party majority but still unlikely due the continued failure of the Conservatives to catch on in Ontario, and the large constituency that simply will never vote Conservative.

A Liberal majority would require a virtual sweep of Ontario, as in '93 or '97, a return in Quebec, and a sweep of the Maritimes. That is to say, all the conditions of the '90s--but the right wing isn't divided anymore. The only alternative would be a Liberal reemergence in the West, which is not on the immediate agenda.

Nobody else will be close to a majority anytime soon.

Especially given the impetus in many provinces (BC and Ontario most notably) toward electoral reform, it seems likely that Canadians will eventually tire of the cycle--not necessarily of minority government per se, but of votes not translating correctly into outcomes. This heralds a change toward PR on a federal level, and possibly coalition majority governments. But I would predict there will not be another federal single-party majority government--and in the unlikely event there is, it will be Conservative.