Tag Archives: Suburbs

Searching for suburbia’s new business plan: Fairfax Co, VA edition

Fairfax County Ambulance. Image from Elvert Barnes.

Fairfax County Ambulance. Image from Elvert Barnes.

The front page of Sunday’s Washington Post (below the fold) featured this article on the fiscal challenges facing Fairfax County, VA. No longer the bleeding edge of the suburban frontier in Northern Virginia, Fairfax County now must deal with the rising costs of maintaining the lifestyle it marketed to residents: good schools, good parks, low taxes and low density.

Antonio Olivo writes:

A population that is growing older, poorer and more diverse is sharpening the need for basic services in what is still the nation’s second-wealthiest county, even as a sluggish local economy maintains a chokehold on the revenue stream.

Since the 2008 recession, local officials have whittled away at programs to the tune of $300 million. They now say that there is no fat left to trim.

Instead, they are searching for ways to raise taxes, draw new businesses and revitalize worn neighborhoods. Their effort mirrors the struggle of aging suburban communities nationwide, as a turn-of-the century economic boom settles into a sluggish post-recession status quo.

Few greenfield development opportunities remain; the county’s older facilities are at the end of their useful lifespans and must be replaced. Demographics are changing. Now the bill is coming due. Fairfax is coming to terms with what Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns termed the suburban growth ponzi scheme.

Olivo’s article highlights several anecdotes of the fiscal struggle:

  • Shorter hours of operation for libraries
  • Deferred maintenance for government vehicles
  • Shrinking benefits for public school employees
  • Growing backlog of park maintenance needs

The basic business model for suburban places like Fairfax relied on low costs to provide a high quality of services at low tax rates and with relatively low productivity from the land (e.g. low density development). As those once high-quality facilities need replacement, as operating costs rise, the business model previously fueled by growth on the suburban edge has no place left to go.

Some of those amenities seem wildly implausible today: eight different Fairfax high schools had planetariums built into the structures:

Fairfax built state-of-the-art planetariums at eight of its high schools decades ago, an embodiment of the county’s belief that the sky was the limit.

Now the equipment is out of date… Astronomy teacher Lee Ann Hennig has been promised a new digital projector for the planetarium at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, part of a $90 million renovation project that, among other things, is supposed to bring new labs for neuroscience and oceanography to the elite magnet school.

When part of the attraction of suburbia is getting more for your money – more square footage, a bigger yard, a bigger garage – it’s not hard to see that mentality of suburban excess creep into government spending. Installing a planetarium in each of eight (“the greatest concentration of planetaria in the United States except for Dallas, Texas”) high schools instead of funding one facility and send students on occasional field trips? It’s not only a large capital cost, but the indefinite obligation to maintain and operate those facilities.

In addition to those challenges on the cost side, Fairfax is facing revenue pressures as well. Homeowners are weary of property tax increases, and commercial property tax revenues have yet to fully recover from the Great Recession:

Cuts in federal spending — about $1.5 billion less in Fairfax than in 2010 — have emptied out office buildings, leading to a 16.5 percent vacancy rate that is the highest since the 1991 recession. Since 2013, commercial property taxes have dropped $23.2 million.

Much of that drop in commercial property value is tied to the massive shift in favor of Metro-accessible office locations and walkable places – away from suburban office parks. Fairfax is wisely focusing redevelopment of their metro-accessible places into a denser, more fiscally sustainable urban model, but this is big lift.

And demographics are changing: there’s more poverty, more diversity, and an older, grayer population. This mirrors national trends (for more, see this three part series from Amanda Kolson Hurley in Citylab; including an interview with Myron Orfield, a scholar who has long forecast the need for a change in the suburban business model).

Fairfax is left with three basic options:

  1. Urbanize: redevelop in a denser, more efficient pattern (both for tax revenues and for providing services)
  2. Raise taxes to continue providing high quality services, despite increasing costs
  3. Muddle through

The most likely path will involve bits from all three. Fairfax is lucky to have some assets to urbanize around and a stronger regional real estate market to fuel that transformation; other suburban jurisdictions around the US aren’t so lucky.

Challenges to affordable housing in growing cities and regions

Suburban Apartments and Estates - Now Renting. CC image from moominsean.

Suburban Apartments and Estates – Now Renting. CC image from moominsean.

Call it gentrification, call it renewal, call it anything you like. Intense demand for city living is putting tremendous pressure on urban housing markets. Meeting that demand with new development reshapes the physical fabric of the city, but preserving the physical status quo in the face of that demand leads to rising prices in the existing housing stock.

David Byrne issued an ultimatum to New York: if gentrification from the 1% stifles the city’s creativity, he’s “out of here.” At the same time, Ed Glaeser remarks that New York should celebrate it’s ability to attract the rich – this kind of agglomeration of skills and talent is what makes cities special places. It’s not the fact that the rich are coming back to the city that’s problematic, but that the city isn’t still able to provide opportunities at all price points. David Madden notes that gentrification’s current pace is not trickling down to the middle and lower classes.

All the demand for urban living presents the ‘good problem to have.’ But good problems still represent problems.

Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of San Francisco based non-profit SPUR, stepped into the fray with an essay for Atlantic Cities on the failure to relieve the demand-side pressure and the resulting consequences: his friends keep moving to Oakland because they can no longer afford San Francisco:

A great quality of life and a lot of high-paying professional jobs meant that a lot of people wanted to live here. And they still do.

But the city did not allow its housing supply to keep up with demand. San Francisco was down-zoned (that is, the density of housing or permitted expansion of construction was reduced) to protect the “character” that people loved…

Whatever the merits of this strategy might be in terms of preserving the historic fabric of the city, it very clearly accelerated the rise in housing prices. As more people move to the Bay Area, the demand for housing continues to increase far faster than supply.

Metcalf expanded on the idea in an interview with SFGate.com:

Now, should there be places for middle-income folks to live? Absolutely. But it can’t be done with the existing housing stock. Smart new places will have to be built.

That includes high-density buildings, micro-units and new construction. It also means getting a grip on the incredibly complex and restricting planning process that stalls every development. The whoa-on-growth movement began in the early ’70s, and there’s a direct corelation between that and higher prices.

“Up until the mid-’70s,” Metcalf says, “our housing prices tracked right at the national average.”

Over the past 20 years, Metcalf says San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units a year. Compare that with Seattle, which is averaging 3,000 units a year with a smaller population. And even that wouldn’t be enough.

Increasing density and allowing the market to meet the demand for new space is part of the solution. In a high-demand place like San Francisco, it’s probably best characterized as a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition. Part of the challenge is that center cities can liberalize their zoning regulations a great deal and still not seem to make much headway in affordability. The regional nature of housing markets, spanning across multiple jurisdictions with multiple regulatory structures, makes it difficult for any one jurisdiction alone to make a dent in the supply.

Consider the case of Long Island: a September New York Times article on Long Island’s lack of available apartments looks to a recent report from the Regional Plan Association to underscore the challenge:

According to a new report from the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and policy group, 55 percent of all 20- to 34-year-olds on Long Island still live with their parents, which is up 11 percent in a decade and appears to be one of the highest rates in the country.

But while some may actively choose to sleep in full view of their teenage posters and trophies, most are there because there are few other places they can go.

The article closes with an anecdote that illustrates the assymetry of demand in the housing market and the regional impacts it can have:

Peter Ottaviano, 24, who graduated from college two years ago, has been living at his parents’ home in Cold Spring Harbor and working for a public relations firm in Great Neck. He looked at some Long Island apartments, but said he wasn’t impressed by the offerings. He signed a lease this month on a two-bedroom in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he and a friend will live for about $2,000 a month, and reverse-commute.

For Mr. Ottaviano, it came down to a paradox: young people aren’t likely to put down roots on Long Island until there are more young people on Long Island. “I want to be where my friends are, where there’s a lot going on, in the middle of everything,” he said. “That’s why I’m moving to New York.”

Long Island – home to the kind of mass produced suburban housing that provided the market-rate affordability for American cities in their suburban booms is now facing the same kinds of challenges that older places encounter.

As the 24-year-old Ottaviano’s housing decision shows, part of the question is if the suburbs can develop the kind of quality places that will attract a broader demographic, rather than just a release valve for housing demand. Outside of DC, Montogmery County is explicity looking to attract younger residents – and while reform of the county’s liquor laws alone won’t likely do it (or help the County chase the nebulous “hip” demographics), it can’t hurt.

But still need to build the additional density. Proposals for efficiency apartments in Fairfax County face strong opposition (including an elected official insinuating that affordable housing will bring gang violence and sexual predators); a transit-oriented, mixed-use apartment project was recommended for rejection by staff due to (among other things) having too little parking (a still-generous 161 spaces for 141 units) for the County’s taste – despite sitting a stone’s throw away from the Huntington station.

At the same time, we have substantial evidence of the benefits that affordable suburban apartments can bring. David Kirp in the New York Times celebrates the ten year anniversary of suburban New Jersey apartments built under the Mount Laurel doctrine:

“I wish other places could learn from our example,” says Mr. McCaffrey, the former mayor, but that hasn’t happened. Affordable housing is still too rare in suburbia, as zoning laws continue to segregate poor and working-class families. Despite the track record in Mount Laurel and the promise it holds for neighborhoods around the country, it’s hard to imagine that the suburban drawbridge will be lowered anytime soon.

Are evolving suburbs really suburban anymore?

Silicon Valley google map

Leigh Gallagher is in the news with a provocatively titled book, The End of the Suburbs. Gallagher writes about the shifting geography of the American Dream from suburbia to growing cities and walkable places. In a summary for Time, Gallagher writes:

A major change is underway in where and how we are choosing to live. In 2011, for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the rate of urban population growth outpaced suburban growth, reversing a trend that held steady for every decade since the invention of the automobile. In several metropolitan areas, building activity that was once concentrated in the suburban fringe has now shifted to what planners call the “urban core,” while demand for large single-family homes that characterize our modern suburbs is dwindling. This isn’t just a result of the recession. Rather, the housing crisis of recent years has concealed something deeper and more profound happening to what we have come to know as American suburbia. Simply speaking, more and more Americans don’t want to live there anymore.

The American suburb used to evoke a certain way of life, one of tranquil, tree-lined streets, soccer leagues and center hall colonials. Today’s suburb is more likely to evoke endless sprawl, a punishing commute, and McMansions.

A few comments pop into mind:

This isn’t a new idea: Just googling some articles in recent years that I remember off the top of my head:

And I’m sure there are countless others, along with corroborating evidence from declining VMT, growing urban populations, and so on.

‘Suburb’ isn’t a descriptive term: Is Cambridge, MA suburban? Is all within the city limits of Houston, TX urban? The term could refer to the type of built environment, or to the nature of the political jurisdiction in relation to others in the region.

Suburbs are already evolving: Dan Reed highlights urbanizing suburban jurisdictions; Richard Layman describes potential paths for evolution; Josh Dzieza wonders if urbanizing suburbs might take some of the sting out of the culture wars and rhetorical battles between city-dwellers and suburbanites.

Suburban evolution isn’t a new thing: Alexis Madrigal offers a story about searching for the landmarks of Silicon Valley, finding that the center of a new industrial revolution is now a self-storage complex. Part of the myth of Silicon Valley is about a new industry emerging from agricultural landscapes; clean, new industry. But as Madrigal explains, the industry wasn’t that clean, and the pattern isn’t that new:

In our Internet-happy present, it’s easy to forget that up until the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley was an industrial landscape. Hundreds of manufacturers lined the streets of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, and San Jose. This is the Silicon Valley when AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Atari, Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, National Semiconductor, Varian Associates, Xerox, and hundreds of other companies made their products right here in the Bay.

Now, with most of the production shifted overseas, the land uses have changed accordingly. Nonetheless, production of semiconductors and microchips is not without pollution, and leaking chemicals have littered the Valley with Superfund sites:

In contemporary descriptions of Silicon Valley as it was being built, every writer seems to note the absence of smoke stacks. A miracle! A clean industry! A better industrial capitalism!

The aesthetic was intentional. These factories of the future were designed to look like buildings on a college campus, which is to say, Stanford. The Stanford Industrial Park (later, the Stanford Research Park) set the visual standard from its founding in 1951 onward. There were rules governing which parts of the industrial apparatus could be visible, so as not to detract from the idea that these were locations for scholars, not laborers.

“Companies had to follow strict building codes, which included ‘complete concealment’ of things like smokestacks, generators, transformers, ducts, storage tanks, and air conditioning equipment,” environmental historian Aaron Sachs wrote in 1999.

Other municipalities wanted to encourage similar developments, and as Sachs concludes, “Stanford Industrial Park essentially replicated itself several times over–each time spurring the construction of new expressways and strip malls in neighboring areas.” What began as Stanford dean and Silicon Valley godfather Fred Terman’s dream to build “a community of technical scholars” in pleasant industrial parks became the architectural standard for the entire high-tech manufacturing world.

But the manicured look and feel had consequences. Storage tanks were placed underground, out of sight and out of mind. Until suddenly, in 1981, people in south San Jose living near Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM realized they were drinking water contaminated by the two firms’ manufacturing plants.

Several patterns of note: the influence of codes, unintended consequences, agglomeration economies, and the impacts of growth. And, hidden within the stereotypical suburbia is a more complex, evolved place:

What we see here is not simple suburbia. This is a landscape that industrialists, government regulators, and city planners sacrificed to create the computer industry that we know today. It has as much in common with a coal mine or the Port of Oakland as it does with Levittown or Google’s campus. All of which should lead us to a simple conclusion: the Silicon Valley of today is a post-industrial landscape, like the lofts near downtowns across the country, like Lansing, Michigan, like Williamsburg, like Portland’s Pearl District.

What we see now is a surreal imitation of the suburban industrial parks and commercial spaces of yesteryear. They’re built atop the past’s mistakes, erasing them from our maps and eyes.

The evolution of suburbia isn’t new. And Madrigal’s article is well worth the read.

Exporting useful terminology to the suburbs

In this weekend’s Washington Post, Jonathan O’Connell writes about the increasing urbanism of the suburbs. The Post‘s editors title the piece: “Can city life be exported to the suburbs?” serving as yet another example of how the term ‘suburb’ is increasingly worthless.  The article generally discusses the trend of shopping malls and other greenfield development projects to take on explicitly urban characteristics, whether in terms of form or use.

The article’s main example is the Village at Leesburg, but also draws on other town center developments in the area such as Reston Town Center. Where things fall apart in terms of relying on the ‘suburban’ terminology is in citing Clarendon – an area that would be within the core city’s jurisdiction if not for retrocession.

The Village at Leesburg is about 33 miles from the heart of DC. The layout of the development is a fairly typical autocentric pod, adjacent to a grade-separated freeway interchange and high volume arterials that separate it from cul-de-sac residential developments. Grade it on the basis of the characteristics of the development, and the changes towards a more urban condition might seem merely cosmetic.

O’Connell asks: “But can a city be a city if it’s built in the middle of a cornfield?”  Sure it can, if it actually has the characteristics of an urban place.  A place like Reston takes a much stronger step in the direction of urbanism than the lifestyle center depicted above. However, the thrust of the article isn’t wrong by any means.  As Richard Layman notes, ‘urban’ places need not be in big cities alone. Even the smallest farm town can be urban, if you define urbanism in terms of the characteristics of the built environment.

Part of this seems to be a mindset of pitting ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ as opposites, despite the fact that they are anything but.  Perhaps the true foil for ‘urban’ is ‘rural,’ but it certainly is not suburban – whatever suburban might mean.

The end of the piece gets at some of the key differences, speaking less in terms of the hype about a place or how cool it might seem, but about the fundamentals of the underlying city. What our current urban places have is character thanks to their age (all else being equal), and an ability to adapt, evolve, and change:

The buildings were erected over decades, when different architects and designers were in vogue. Every owner has his own vision — one wants a bar, another wants an art gallery or a furniture store. Together, they create a chaotic mix that might not be as functional as what is dreamt up in a developer’s marketing office. But a city’s character, Lanier argues, will be a draw for much longer.

The real question is if the surrounding context allows a place like the Village at Leesburg to evolve or not.

Buying into the urban ‘myth’

Williamsburg Bridge. CC image from Kev Gilmour

(Building off the previous post, in response to this Atlantic Cities piece)

If Feargus O’Sullivan isn’t really moving to a “suburb” as his article is entitled, but rather to a different urban neighborhood – then what’s the reasoning behind this?  O’Sullivan complains about  “hype” and “supposed edginess and creative ferment”, instead arguing that they are “increasingly as banal, antisocial and plain dull as any suburb.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into O’Sullivan’s piece – it’s one thing to be a lament over a supposedly cool place not living up to the hype, or for a personal experience in a place to fall short. Drawing conclusions beyond that seems dubious, but nevertheless interesting fodder for discussion.

So, is this really an indictment of urbanism, or just one of hype?  O’Sullivan’s complaint is focused on “fashionable” neighborhoods, and given the fact that O’Sullivan’s destination in the suburbs isn’t really all that suburban (or, rather, it’s quite urban under a reasonably broad understanding of the term).  This makes me want to discount the idea that it’s the city – rather, the critique seems to be focused about what’s cool.

Some quotes:

For all their reputation as hives of individuality, neighborhoods like my own city’s Broadway Market offer almost identical businesses to those you’d find in currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere.  While the base materials (streets and houses) may be different in, say, NYC’s Greenpoint, Berlin’s Neukölln, or Madrid’s Malasaña, the trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets – make these places seem increasingly homogenous.

So, it’s about gentrification.

Even accepting this description of the problem seems to be setting up a straw man to be beaten down, however.  O’Sullivan claims “people are being asked to buy into an urban myth whose claims don’t always stand up to scrutiny.”  Are they really?  Are people really being asked to buy in to this?  Or perhaps, do they just want the basic characteristics presented by the physical urban environment?

As O’Sullivan delves into “the myth’s central tenets,” he cites the idea of creative people living near the heart of the city.  However, his definition of ‘creative’ is awfully narrow, limited to “starving artists, wannabe writers, thinkers, eccentrics, [and] aesthetes.”  But we know (through empirical evidence) that innovation and density are linked.  O’Sullivan admits this is a narrow definition (both of creativity and, previously, of urbanism), but points out that his myth holds out for “more exciting neighbours.”  This seems to be a critique not of the places O’Sullivan visits, but of the trendiness that colors his experience.

Indeed, what is the actual myth here? At Salon, Will Doig writes about Williamsburg, Brooklyn, asking: “Are urban bohemias, you know, so over?”   Doig notes”Pre-hipster Williamsburg was a neighborhood of working-class ethnic groups, crack dealers and violence — but also, crucially, post-industrial vacancy: boarded-up factories, weed-choked lots, an abandoned waterfront, train tracks to nowhere.” The answer draws on a similar line from an Atlantic piece by Benjamin Schwarz entitled Gentrification and its Discontents, noting similar critiques from other authors:

He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

Despite these lamentations about the change of the city (which Doig’s piece notes wouldn’ve been unthinkable for a city-dweller in the 1920s – particularly if one reads Robert Fogelson’s Downtown), Doig closes with this from the gentrifying ‘hood:

As the neighborhood begins to upscale in a way that fills Anasi with dismay, Napoleon opens Williamsburg’s first proper lounge and rides the crest of the transformation with purpose. His swanky club becomes a smash hit, and helps create a whole new scene on the sleepy south side. Moreover, it gives the young entrepreneur — a poor kid of color from a dangerous neighborhood — a chance at a life he might not have otherwise had.

Given the larger scale economic processes, it’s hard to understand what these writers are making a big deal out of, whether it’s a myth of urbanism or some sense of authenticity.  On one hand, O’Sullivan’s embrace of a less-cool neighborhood would seem to undermine the fears of a lost bohemia and instead embrace the idea of a large pent-up demand for urban living of all stripes, myth or not.

‘Suburb:’ an increasingly worthless term

1954 GMC Suburban Ad - CC image from Alden Jewell

Hot of the presses last week at The Atlantic Cities was a piece from Feargus O’Sullivan entitled “Why I Moved Back to the Suburbs.”  Without touching on the reasons for O’Sullivan to make that move, the very premise depends on what you call a suburb.  As it turns out, O’Sullivan’s destination ‘burb isn’t really all that suburban to my view of the term:

 I should point out here that London’s outer districts are quite different from the average American suburb. For a start, they’re often pretty old – areas built no later than the 1930s still abut fields along some stretches of the city’s limits. They also tend to have medium rather than low population density, with decent transport links and broad, walkable sidewalks that mean car ownership is desirable but not essential. What they share with the U.S. however is their sprawl and their reputation for conformity – it’s often said that it was the dullness of suburbs a few miles beyond mine that helped spawnBritain’s Punk movement.

I don’t know that those ‘burbs are all that different from similarly aged American suburbs around the nation’s primary city, either. The further descriptors only serve to emphasize how useless the term ‘suburb’ is – this place has the key qualities of moderately dense development, strong transit links, and a walkable urban design.  If you were to ask someone in the US to identify a place with those characteristics without using the label, I’ll bet the responses would identify outlying urban neighborhoods with good access to the city – or, in other words, places that most would call ‘urban.’

So, to get value out of the word ‘suburb’ it would help to define it in terms of characteristics (similar to this exercise in defining sprawl and using the term for more than just outward patterns of development). O’Sullivan isn’t the only one to fall for this.  Joel Kotkin is notorious for praising the virtues of the suburbs while conjuring visions of Levittowns, while his analysis hinges on the political definition of a suburb (and all of the arbitrary boundaries therein) and ends up lumping Levittowns and McMansions in with Jersey City.  And it isn’t just political boundaries – Cap’n Transit notes that the New York Times has called the Upper West Side suburban in the past.

Cap’n Transit also hits on the need to define these places in terms of the characteristics, rather than just relying on the label:

The problem is that there are several features of suburbs that catch our attention more than whether they are within the city limits. We often essentialize these features and assume that all suburbs are that way. When someone says “suburb” they may actually be referring to just a few of those features, or even a single one.

I don’t know if I agree with Cap’n’s categories, but it does raise the issue of separating broad categories of key characteristics:  There physical factors, relating to density, design, land use, location, the built and natural environments, etc. – and I would posit that the physical factors are mostly the same as those used to define sprawl, just with different positions on the continuum of choices.  There are social and economic factors, covering race/ethnicity, language, income, wealth, jobs, etc.  There are network factors as well, looking at links to the core city, considering modes of transport and the quality of the links.  I suppose there’s also a category for institutional considerations, perhaps including those arbitrary political boundaries and other quirks of governance.

No matter what term you want to use as the sum of those characteristics, at least the characteristics tell a more complete story.  The New Urbanist transect model helps refine the thinking on some of these issues – at least with regard to the physical, built environment.  That said, the transect zone labeled as “sub-urban” (T-3) wouldn’t match the terminology used by others in different contexts.

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.

Local cities and regions

From luca5 on Flickr

From luca5 on Flickr

Jarrett Walker highlights a rather disturbing turn of phrase from David Brooks’ recent profile of Senator John Thune (R – South Dakota).  Walker notes:

David Brooks gives urbanists a velvet-gloved insult:

His populism is not angry. … But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

This rhetorical device is meant to imply, without quite saying, that “local” is the opposite of “urban”, just as “small” is the opposite of “big.”

In the grand scheme of politics, this isn’t all that surprising.  It’s also frustratingly inaccurate, as any metropolitan dweller can attest – things are just as local in the big city as they are out in the wide open spaces.  For all the positive words coming out of the Obama administration concerning not just cities, but metropolitan areas and their central role in our culture, our economy, and so on.

Matt Yglesias also notes the backlash, highlighting a passage from Christopher Hitchens:

The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast.

…

The research universities and major business enterprises that our the foundation of our way of life are, overwhelmingly, in major metropolitan areas. Not because there’s anything wrong with the people of rural Alaska, but because that’s how the world works. The idea of making dislike of metropolitan American (or perhaps all of metropolitan America except Houston) the basis of your approach to governing is pretty nuts.

Walker notes that the Republicans have nothing to gain from the cities, so why bother even trying?

But the Republicans have lost the cities. (As New York Governor George Pataki supposedly said to George Bush as they approached the crowds gathered to hear Bush speak on the site of 9/11: “See all those people? None of them voted for you!”) So they may well feel that they can use “urban” in a negative sense without much cost.

Perhaps the best way to counter this is to do so with the truth.  This isn’t about urban vs. rural, it’s about (as Matt notes) metropolitan vs. rural.  Metropolitan areas need to have a strong core, but don’t need to be burdened with the connotations of the word ‘urban.’  It’s also a more accurate description and approach to how our cities and regions actually operate.  They’re not constrained by the artificial jurisdictional boundaries our politicians have to deal with.

Finally, I take some solace knowing that turning your back on cities and metro areas is tantamount to a political death sentence.  Hitchens notes:

But the problem with populism is not just that it stirs prejudice against the “big cities” where most Americans actually live, or against the academies where many of them would like to send their children. No, the difficulty with populism is that it exploits the very “people” to whose grievances it claims to give vent.

Nate Silver also noted the demographic danger in casting off the suburbs and cities as an electoral strategy in this post-mortem of the 2008 election results:

In 1992, when Bill Clinton won his first term, 35 percent of American voters were identified as rural according to that year’s national exit polls, and 24 percent as urban. This year, however, the percentage of rural voters has dropped to 21 percent, while that of urban voters has climbed to 30. The suburbs, meanwhile, have been booming: 41 percent of America’s electorate in 1992, they represent 49 percent now (see chart).In other words, if you are going to pit big cities against small towns, it is probably a mistake to end up on the rural side of the ledger… With the votes that he banked in the cities, Obama did not really need to prevail in the suburbs. But he did anyway — as every winning presidential candidate has done since 1980 — bettering McCain by 2 points there. Indeed, among the many mistakes the McCain campaign made was targeting the rural vote rather than the suburban one, as Bush and Karl Rove did in 2000 and 2004.

Indeed.  Cities and their metropolitan areas are more intertwined than ever, and politicians should denigrate them at their own peril.  They are the places where the vast majority of Americans have their local connections – even the urban ones.