Category Archives: Suburbia

Changing suburbia

Some suburban items to share today:

Design: Infrastructurist takes a look at the problem of culs-de-sac (which I believe is the proper plural of cul de sac).

cul-de-sacs

Commenters take note of some serious issues with this particular study, but the general point still stands – culs de sac remove key links from the street network, requiring longer and more circuitous routes to get to the same destinations.  Developments of these kind of street patterns are no small part of America’s long history of vehicle miles traveled increasing far faster than the rate of population growth.

Diversity: The Washington Post has an article on the changing face of suburbia – more socially and economically diverse, and dealing with new sets of problems that many of these communities have never had to deal with before:

Demographers at Brookings say suburbs are developing many of the same problems and attractions that are more typically associated with cities. And cities, in turn, have been drawing more residents who are young and affluent, so the traditional income gap between wealthier suburbs and more diverse cities narrowed slightly.

“The decade brought many cities and suburbs still closer together along a series of social, demographic and economic dimensions,” said the report, titled “State of Metropolitan America.”

The other substantive point is about how Americans perceive their surroundings (urban, suburban, rural) compared to how their city and their urban economy actually functions:

The report outlines a decade in which several demographic milestones were passed as the nation’s population topped 300 million midway through. About two-thirds of Americans live in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, virtually all regions with populations of 500,000 or more.

“We think we’re a small-town nation,” Berube said. “But small towns exist because they’re connected to something bigger, which allows residents to make a living.”

Density: Ryan Avent has long marked the economic benefits of density and the nature of urban agglomerations, but he has an interesting point on the marginal benefits of added density, noting that modest increases in the less dense suburbs could have a troubling impact, while modest increases in the already dense core, already designed at a walkable scale, would have serious benefits for local retail.

So let’s think about the effects of doubling density in Fairfax and the District. Now on the one hand, the benefits to doubling density in Fairfax are likely to be larger than those in Washington for reasons of scale alone — in the Fairfax example, more people are added. That makes for a deeper labour pool, a larger skills base, and so on. On the other hand, Fairfax density is likely to be less effective density. Fairfax is built in a fairly standard, suburban way. It’s not built at a walkable scale, the road system is arterial rather than gridded, transit options are limited, and so on. Doubling density, absent major infrastructure improvements, might actually reduce the metropolitan access of Fairfax residents.

Not so in the District. Yes, with more people roads, buses, and the Metro would be more heavily taxed. At the same time, every neighborhood would become individually more convenient. Brookland is fairly low density for a District neighborhood, but it’s basically built to be walkable. Were density in Brookland to double, the retail and commercial options within easy walking distance of Brookland residents would more than double.

The problem with doubling the density in a place like Fairfax County, aside from the infrastructure issues that Ryan highlights, is that you’d end up with a place that’s stuck in the no-man’s land of density – too dense for the auto-oriented infrastructure to function smoothly, but not dense enough to really tap into the critical mass and benefits of walkable urban places.

Defining sprawl

Rural Sprawl

When reading discussions about sprawl, one thing often becomes painfully clear – no one quite knows exactly how to define sprawl.  Defining sprawl probably bears some similarities to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscene pornography – “I know it when I see it.”   Indeed, when we’re talking about a qualitative measure of the built environment, it’s not particularly easy to come up with an authoritative definition.

First, I’d point out that when I talk about sprawl (as noted above), I’m talking about the built environment.   Too often, discussions get framed in polar terms – urbanity vs. sprawl, inner cities vs. suburbs, etc.  I don’t find any of these dichotomies are particularly useful in describing the built environment – not only do they not fit the complex patterns of development, but associations with inner cities or suburbs are too often charged with relatively unrelated social characteristics.

Sprawl is also not synonymous with suburbia, nor is it equal to a simple outward growth of an urban area.  Sprawl has four key characteristics, each of which are inter-related:

Density – sprawling development is typically low density, but land use patterns often prevent the positive externalities of density from accruing.

Segregation of land use – separating land uses into different parcels is both a product of lower densities and auto-centric design…

Auto-centrism – what distinguishes sprawl from just suburban growth is the focus on the automobile as the only real means of transportation.

Outward growth – the connotation of sprawling out, away from the city is only one factor of urban sprawl.  Sprawl often involves ‘leapfrog’ development away from the periphery.

Except for the outward growth, each of those points could be considered to be the opposite end of the spectrum for the 3D’s of Density, Diversity, and Design.

Cap’n Transit hits on some of these points – noting that all suburbs are not sprawl (and many of today’s urban core neighborhoods were once considered suburban development on the periphery):

Drum’s question actually shows that a lot of urban history is being forgotten. Most “urban cores” started out as bedroom communities. Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights, Long Island City and the Bronx were suburbs once. Hudson County, the part of New Jersey across the river from Manhattan, includes the four densest towns in the US, according to the 2000 census: Guttenberg, West New York, Union City and Hoboken. I’ve long thought that New York should just annex Hudson County as the fifth borough and be done with it.

If those are too “urban core” for you, consider these “streetcar suburbs” of Westchester County, all of whom have high-rise apartments walking distance from a commuter rail station, downtown shops and a supermarket: Scarsdale, where Garth Road is lined with seven- to ten-story luxury co-ops; Bronxville; the Fleetwood neighborhood of Mount Vernon; New Rochelle; Larchmont; and many more.

Oh, and for Jarrett, these Westchester suburbs all have twice-hourly trains to Grand Central Station six days a week, and hourly service on Sundays.

Most of these buildings were built years ago, between 1920 and 1960; for more recent dense suburb-building, see the claims for various DC suburbs. New Rochelle has also seen some recent high-rise transit-oriented development.

A sprawling synopsis

Image from Dean Terry on flickr

Image from Dean Terry on flickr

There’s been a great back and forth across the blogosphere in the past few days on sprawl, zoning, land use regulation, and market forces.  A brief synopsis and chronology:

3/18, 8:47 am – Randal O’Toole – complete with terms like ‘poppycock’ that completely fit the mental image I have of him:

This is all balderdash and poppycock. People who believe it should get their noses out of Kunstler’s biased diatribes and look at some real data and see how zoning actually worked before it was hijacked by authoritarian urban planners. It doesn’t take much to show that areas without any zoning or regulation will — if developed today — end up as what planners call “sprawl.” Until recently, all that zoning has done has been to affirm the kind of development that people want.

3/18, 12:58 pm – Matt Yglesias -Yglesias argues that our sprawling environment isn’t a manifestation of market demand:

I’m not personally interested in debating the “smart growth” slogan. My point is that from a policy point of view excessive regulation of land use in already developed areas is bad for the economy and for the environment. And to be specific and clear about this, I don’t think the problem is “libertarian” hypocrites per se, the problem is specifically John Stossel and Randall O’Toole who are stridently opposed to anti-sprawl regulations but seem totally uninterested in sprawl-promoting ones.

3/18, 7:28 pm – Kevin Drum – we have exclusionary zoning regulations because people really, really want them.

I need to be clear here: I’m neither praising nor condemning this, just describing how things are. To get an idea of how strongly people feel about this, you really need to come live in a suburb for a while. But failing that, consider the balance of power here. Corporations would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. Wealthy land developers would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. And local governments hate single-family neighborhoods because they’re a net tax loss: they cost more in services than they return in property tax remittances. And yet, even with corporations, wealthy developers, and local governments all on one side, suburban zoning is ubiquitous. This is a triumvirate that, under normal circumstances, could get practically anything they wanted, but in this case it’s not even a close fight. Suburban residents have them completely overwhelmed.

3/19, 11:18 am – Ryan Avent – zoning is about exclusion and control – it is a manifestation of NIMBY attitudes and not one of popularity:

So people build where it’s easiest and cheapest to build, which is on the urban fringe. And walkability is difficult to build on the urban fringe because transportation will be overwhelmingly auto-oriented (the fringe being distant from employment and retail centers and unserved by transit). So you get acres of tract housing, which subsequently become filled with people, who then do what homeowners everywhere in the country do, which is try to exclude new people from moving in to their neighborhood. And development then moves further outward.

But the notion that suburban sprawl wins out simply because it is so popular is belied by housing cost data. People live where they can afford to live, and if they can’t afford to live in a walkable area, then they’ll opt to live in sprawl rather than go homeless. And once there they’ll act to defend their investment by fighting development projects that may have unpredictable impacts on the value of nearby single-family homes.

3/19, 2:28 pm – Matt Yglesias – exclusion is a general phenomenon (see NIMBYism), not just suited for suburbia and sprawling places.

It’s true that the problem of overly restrictive land-use rules is in large part a problem of voter-preference. But it’s not a problem of voter-preference for sprawl per se. It’s a general problem of homeowner eagerness to exclude outsiders. It’s politically difficult to build dense infill development in Washington, DC and that’s not because DC residents want to live in sprawling areas or because DC residents approve of sprawl as a phenomenon. It’s a mixture of selfishness, misunderstanding, and poor institutional design. As Ben Adler reminds us, surveys indicate that about a third of Americans would like to live in walkable urban areas but less than 10 percent of the country’s dwelling units are in areas that fit the bill. That’s why houses in walkable central cities (Manhattan) and walkable suburbs (near Metro in Arlington Country, VA for example) are so expensive.

3/19, 2:45 pm – Kevin Drum – No, people like sprawl.  Honestly.

Sure, exclusion is part of the dynamic here, but by far the bigger part of it is that lots and lots of people actively like living in non-dense developments. Seriously: they really do. It’s not a trick. So they vote with their feet and move to the suburbs and then vote with their ballots to keep big-city living at bay. Given an ideal world, of course, they’d love to have a nice 3,000 square foot house with a big yard right in the middle of Manhattan, but one way or another, they want that house.

3/19, 7:07 pm – Ryan Avent – Price data shows a clear preference to walkable, urban places.  Moreover, the density that creates that value also raises productivity – urban walkability is expensive for a reason, the positive externalities of urban lifestyles compound on one another. Suburban residents, however, fight added density and walkability because they never see the benefits of those positive feedback loops:

Say New York started selectively zoning parts of Manhattan for single-family home only use. The first few folks to buy would have a glorious time of things. But as additional people moved in, density would fall. Declining density would ultimately reduce the walkability of Manhattan, but perhaps more importantly, it would lead to a deterioration of the positive externalities associated with the high level of density. Density raises productivity and wages (see this, or this). And because of this benefit and positive spillovers associated with density, we find increasing returns to scale in cities. In many cases, the addition of another person to a dense area increases the return to others of locating in that area. And things work in the opposite direction as populations decline. The fact that residents of dense cities don’t internalize these benefits is one of the reasons they fight new development.

Low density suburban development eats up a lot of land while contributing relatively little to the positive urban externalities associated with density. And meanwhile, the combination of auto-centricity of suburbs with the inability of governments to correctly price congestion externalities means that suburbanites end up limiting urban growth in an economically unfortunate manner by reducing potential wages and raising the real cost of commuting into (and therefore within) the city. One reason sprawl is attractive is that the people living in it aren’t facing the true cost of their decision to live in sprawl (and this is without ever bringing carbon into the mix).

All in all, some very interesting points on sprawl, economics, design, land use, and so on.  I wanted to aggregate these posts here as a baseline for more discussion – because this post is already long enough.  I didn’t even get a chance to touch on the discussions of High Speed Rail and sprawl – with posts from the CA HSR blog, as well as the Transport Politic.

Suburban Regulation

Photo by millicent bystander

Photo by millicent bystander

Over the past week or so, there’s been a great deal of words blogged amongst various econobloggers on suburban subsidies, regulations, built form, etc.  Are they the product of market demand, and thus an accurate gauge of the preferences we have for urban design? Why do libertarians not take on these subsidies and distortions in the market, when they clearly have an enormous impact in what we build and how we get around?

Didn’t we just have this libertarian-vs-urbanist discussion as it related to high speed rail?

Ryan Avent pointed to a bizarre post from Bryan Caplan, where Caplan proffers that zoning restrictions against mixed use were somehow pro-urban.   Ryan managed to get Tyler Cowen’s attention, if not change his mind.  Ryan has other posts on the subject, too – and there are many more, but I can’t even keep track of them all.

Throughout the entire discussion, it became increasingly clear to me that no one was being very precise in what they mean by ‘suburb.’  Indeed, the word itself is so broad that it can’t have too precise of a meaning – yet at the same time, I think most of us know a suburb when we see one.

Some refer to suburbs by jurisdiction – but this isn’t particularly accurate.   Some parts of DC are essentially old streetcar suburbs.  Likewise, parts of suburban jurisdictions have distinct pockets of urban form (Silver Spring, Bethesda, etc.), and many jurisdictions are so large and varied that defining them with one word is a exercise in futility (how would you characterize Montgomery County – it has urban, rural, and everything in between).

When speaking of what makes great urban places, we talk about Density, Diversity, and Design.   In evaluating whether a place is ‘suburban’ or not (or more accurately, what kind of suburb we’re talking about), it makes more sense to look at form rather than jurisdiction.

Ryan Avent gets to the heart of the matter:

At the heart of many of Tyler’s posts are questions about what drove the growth of the suburbs. This is a question that really must be framed appropriately to make sense.

If one refers to suburbs as development outside the traditional or center city, then suburbs have basically been around as long as cities. Some share of population growth has always been accommodated by development at the urban fringe. Development of new transportation technologies changed the pace and the form of suburban developments over time, as did the increase in population growth associated with industrial development. But outward growth is a natural part of urban development.

When we talk about the phenomenon of rapid suburban growth in America, we’re largely asking questions about why that growth took a particular form and why that growth coincided with decline in center cities. Obviously, new suburban growth forms were largely a function of the automobile, but that’s not the end of the story. Specific choices were made to accommodate the automobile in various ways, and those choices affected decisions at the margins, and given the importance of feedback loops in urban settings these choices were potentially quite powerful in certain circumstances.

Simply viewing suburbs as the natural outward extension of the city isn’t a sufficient analytical framework.  It addresses location, but not density, diversity, or design.  Indeed, many older streetcar suburbs would be considered urban today, certainly within the purview of what New Urbanists often seek to create.

The Three D’s, the factors important to urban/suburban form (not just location), have been highly regulated and influenced by specific policy choices.  Matt Yglesias captures this idea with a rhetorical question:

Maybe us urbanists are wrong, and even though it seems to be the case that suburban sprawl in the United States is systematically supported by a series of direct and indirect subsidies and regulatory mandates that it secretly also reflects underlying market preference and it’s all just some kind of giant coincidence. But why can’t we try to put this proposition to the test?

Indeed.  Why can’t we?