Its as if standard ideological phrases this argumentation is new, compelling, and no one has ever addressed these…erm…”arguments” here! Brilliant.

DS

I like that, I’m gonna use that!

But the urban areas with the least regulatory distortions have by far the most affordable homes in “the city” as well as in the suburbs. Ironically, anti-fringe-development regulations frive up the price of all urban land, and prices are always higher towards the centre of the city. And because the land is what changes in price, not the buildings, the effect is always worse closer to the centre.

It is entirely typical for an affordable-housing city (median multiples of around 3) to have $120,000 suburban homes AND $120,000 CBD condos. But “unaffordable” cities (median multiples of around 6 and higher, and ALWAYS a consequence of fringe growth constraints) invariably have $400,000 suburban homes and $800,000 CBD condos.

This is a consequence of a toolkit of regulations that the smart growth set assures us is aimed at “increasing housing choice”. Nicely done once again, socialists. Hayek must be chuckling about all the “unintended consequences”.

But ironically, in the affordable cities where there IS something resembling “choice”, there does not seem to be much of a rush on the part of all the people who allegedly “prefer to live in the city”, to take advantage of the much greater affordability of that option, in those particular cities.

What I would very much like to see, is the advocates of “smart growth to save the planet”, confront the realities of the way real estate markets and urban economies work to thwart their objectives, and start advocating the only solution that might actually achieve their stated objectives. That is, the nationalisation of land in the locations where they want people to live, for redevelopment to higher densities, to be offered to “the deserving” at COST. This would actually make these locations a bargain not to be refused.

Seeing that the policies that the advocates push through instead of this – i.e. growth boundaries, subsidies to TOD, etc actually have the primary effect of delivering fat capital gains to incumbent property owners, and the very much secondary or negligible effect of increasing urban density at efficient locations; it is THESE advocates who have a case to answer regarding “whose pocket” they are in.

Suburban developers are agnostics – they merely pass costs along. None of them will be found financing advocacy for low regulation. But one single major property investor has rational incentive to spend millions funding “smart growth”. Imagine how much more money the four families who have owned the heart of London for centuries, have made because London has had strict Green belt policies for 60 years; compared to if London had land rent curves more like Houston or Atlanta. Mills and Cheshire estimate in the Introduction to the Handbook of Urban Economics Volume 3 (1999), that prime central land in the most strictly growth-contained cities is 100,000 times more expensive per square foot than equivalent land in any non-growth-constained city.

That was not a typo. The figure is One Hundred Thousand Times – more expensive.

The biggest problem I have with comparisons like this is how they define “city.” If they’re using the area within the central city’s city limits, the comparisons become pretty meaningless since many cities include a lot of areas that could only be considered suburbs (Houston) while others don’t (San Francisco).

But even within the corporate limits of many (most?) “central cities” in the United States, there are large areas which are zoned for single-family detached (e.g. suburban) homes – and some of these areas have been zoned that way for decades.

Not just Los Angeles and San Diego either. But Washington, D.C.; Arlington County, Virginia; Baltimore (City), Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York City (in particular Queens County and Richmond County [Staten Island])

But as the older suburbs become the “urbs” it’s possible to increase density significantly without compromising the existing character of the community. I surely don’t believe in the “the ideologically motivated back-to-the-cities movement,” but maintaining and protecting the SF detached lifestyle will take lots of planning. Today’s planners (at least the good one’s) don’t want everybody to live in a Corbusian nightmare at the gun point of big brother (despite what antiplanners will tell you ).

DS

We’ve [presented it] here many, many, many times.

DS

Anyone have data on how many move to the suburbs for economic reasons (i.e. cheaper rent/housing cost) but would prefer living the city if they could afford comparable housing? Any data on how many people currently living in the suburbs have always preferred suburbs and have never lived in an urban core?

See, yes, some people, like myself, prefer to live in the city, but if I want to buy or even rent a SFH, I have to go to the suburbs. But many others I’ve talked to, worked with, etc., actually prefer the suburbs and have a very negative prejudice toward urban life.

This was certainly true in suburban Portland; sheltered children’s parents never took them to “filthy” downtown. This was true downtown where at a musuem museum suburban tourists bitched about downtown, the traffic, the one-way streets, the noise, the bums, the trash, etc. (And when they left, the workers bitched about the suburbs.)

Most recently, suburbanites constantly asked why I live in Seattle and not their suburb, a cultural desert of endless malls, chain restaurants, and big box stores. So I used my wife as an excuse; her job is in the city and her commute would suck. The truth was that the suburb in which I worked sucked, and I finally just started telling people the truth; I’d never live in that filthy, crime-ridden, ghetto suburb under any circumstances. They all loved their $h!t hole and thought I was wacko for loving Seattle.

Clearly some people prefer urban centers and some people prefer suburban areas. Perhaps more prefer to live in suburban areas simply because more people live in suburban areas. Take Seattle, for example: 600k in the city limits and another 2.8 million live in the suburbs. So with the city center population at 20% of the metro, is it not possible that more people do actually prefer the suburbs?