The Antiplanner

Job Sprawl? Horrors!

7th April 2009

Job Sprawl? Horrors!

posted in News commentary |

The Brookings Institute just discovered the jobs are moving to the suburbs along with people. According to their press release, this decades-old trend “undermines long-term regional [and] national prosperity.”

“Allowing jobs to shift away from city centers hurts economic productivity, creates unsustainable and energy inefficient development, and limits access to underemployed workers,” says Brookings senior fellow Robert Puentes. But neither he nor the author of the study, Elizabeth Kneebone, actually proves that any of these things will happen — or how we’ve managed to survive for so long in the face of this adversity.

The study itself uses the curious procedure of measuring changes in job numbers within three miles, three to ten miles, and outside of ten miles of downtown. That would be fine if all metro areas covered the same geographic area, but the urban areas reviewed by Brookings ranged from Atlanta, which covers 2,000 square miles, to Trenton, which covered less than 100 square miles in 2000.

Not surprisingly, Trenton was found to have a lot less job sprawl than Atlanta. “The larger the metro area,” the study insightfully observed, “the more likely people are to work more than 10 miles away from downtown.” Well, duh.

Brookings’ rather strange criteria meant that metro areas that are beloved of the anti-sprawl crowd, such as Portland and San Jose, were found to have some of the worst job sprawl. This shouldn’t be at all surprising: a key plank in the smart-growth platform is to promote a jobs-housing balance. Achieving this goal requires that lots of jobs move to the suburbs to balance the concentration of jobs downtown.

I guess Brookings — or at least Puentes and Kneebone — decided to come out against smart growth.

Just why is it so important that jobs be concentrated downtown? Kneebone uses the old argument that more dispersed jobs require more driving, but never mentions that it allows people to drive in less congestion. Kneebone also frets that job dispersal takes potential jobs away from inner-city low-income workers. But this contradicts the whole point of the smart-growth jobs-housing balance thing.

Finally, Kneebone claims that infrastructure for low-density development costs more than for high densities. But this is different than saying that infrastructure 10 miles away from downtown costs more than infrastructure downtown. In fact, it probably costs a lot less. Even if infrastructure in the suburbs costs more, those costs are more than offset by other savings.

For example, planners in Calgary, which the Antiplanner recently visited, just published a report on the costs of sprawl. The report finds that Calgary’s sprawl alternative (also known as the current direction) will cost the city $11.2 billion more to serve a projected 1.3 million new residents than its preferred, compact alternative.

Calgary has about 2.6 people per dwelling unit, so $11.2 billion averages out to $22,000 per home. Against that extra cost, the average cost of a home in the Vancouver metro area was (according to the 2006 census) almost $140,000 more than in the Calgary metro area. Since Vancouver has long had a smart-growth plan like the one Calgary wants to adopt, this is a rough approximation of the trade off.

In other words, it’s not all about infrastructure costs. Both businesses and homebuyers must consider land costs, taxes, and the costs of regulation, all of which tend to be lower the further you get away from downtown.

Moreover, nearly all of Calgary’s added costs of sprawl are roads, water, and sewers. These can easily be charged to the people using those facilities. So what’s wrong with charging people and letting them decide if they want to live or work downtown or on the urban fringe?

In other words, Kneebone is making a mountain out of a well-explored molehill. Alan Pisarski documented the dispersal of jobs decades ago in his Commuting in America series. Brookings managed to get some nice coverage for this report, but all it really means is that decentralization is going to continue no matter what the planners want.

Update: This article from the Buffalo News affirms why jobs are moving away from downtowns: “because the outer suburbs have the one thing many businesses think essential for their designs — large amounts of land that would accommodate the modern vision of a workplace.” Keeping these jobs in the city requires that cities engage in expensive brownfield clean ups — just one more cost ignored by Brookings’ intrepid researchers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under News commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 13 responses to “Job Sprawl? Horrors!”

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  1. 1 On April 7th, 2009, the highwayman said:

    Well what you wrote is convoluted too, CBD’s tend to have a higher level of white collar jobs and blue collar jobs tend to be in nature more on the side.

    What you are evading are the zoning and forced parking regulations that are placed on top of this, which caused the mess that people complain about.

    Sorry O’Toole but, you can’t claim to be a anarcho-capitalist & yet act like a dictator at the same time.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 1:33 am

  2. 2 On April 7th, 2009, mattb02 said:

    What the hell are you on about Highwayman? It’s one straw man after another with you.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 3:07 am

  3. 3 On April 7th, 2009, mattb02 said:

    If job sprawl is occurring as a result of workers and businesses expressing their preferences and the preferneces of their customers, then it is highly unlikely job sprawl hurts either productivity or economic wellbeing, for the simple reason that if it does either of those things then workers and businesses will privately bear the cost of that loss in productivity and welfare. Those costs can avoided by moving back into the CBD.

    On the other hand, if job sprawl is the product of regulation or distortions from tax incentives then Brookings may be right. But since when did government favour sprawl?

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 3:13 am

  4. 4 On April 7th, 2009, Borealis said:

    Mattb02 has it right. Why is it bad for jobs to move to the suburbs? That is just the market doing what it does best — adjusting to the most efficient arrangements. Why should government force jobs to be created downtown, where they are most expensive?

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 6:12 am

  5. 5 On April 7th, 2009, C. P. Zilliacus said:

    I saw that Baltimore is considered one of the places with “rapid decentralization.”

    Well, that makes sense, since the largest employer in the state is shown by the state’s own data as being Fort George G. Meade in suburban Anne Arundel County, which makes sense, since that’s where the federal government’s massive National Security Agency is located.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 9:58 am

  6. 6 On April 7th, 2009, ws said:

    ROT:In other words, it’s not all about infrastructure costs. Both businesses and homebuyers must consider land costs, taxes, and the costs of regulation, all of which tend to be lower the further you get away from downtown.

    ws: And then these (low dense) areas urbanize more, traffic builds up, taxes rise, and then people look for alternatives to growth. You’re promoting that we keep the same cycles that have been going on for the last few years.

    ROT:In other words, it’s not all about infrastructure costs

    ws:I think it’s mostly about infrastructure. Why build new infrastructure and services when you can use existing roads, sewers, schools, etc?

    ROT: Keeping these jobs in the city requires that cities engage in expensive brownfield clean ups — just one more cost ignored by Brookings’ intrepid researchers.

    ws: This is a major assumption that most of the land in cities are brownfields. Are they? Even so, brownfields need to be cleaned up at some point, to which the land should be maximized.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 11:17 am

  7. 7 On April 7th, 2009, ws said:

    C. P. Zilliacus I saw that Baltimore is considered one of the places with “rapid decentralization.”

    ws: You could probably tell that by walking the streets. The city has definitely not invested in itself. Although, go a few miles north or south, and you see good examples of what Baltimore should be.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 11:49 am

  8. 8 On April 7th, 2009, the highwayman said:

    mattb02 said: On the other hand, if job sprawl is the product of regulation or distortions from tax incentives then Brookings may be right. But since when did government favour sprawl?

    THWM: Governments haave favored sprawl for a while through zoning and forced parking regulations. Now some governments have swung too far the other way with smarter growth regulation stuff, though keep in mind that this was a response to pre-existing sprawl distortions.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 12:05 pm

  9. 9 On April 7th, 2009, the highwayman said:

    Borealis said: Why is it bad for jobs to move to the suburbs? That is just the market doing what it does best — adjusting to the most efficient arrangements. Why should government force jobs to be created downtown, where they are most expensive?

    THWM: Why would CBD location be any more expensive then a suburban location?

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 12:12 pm

  10. 10 On April 7th, 2009, ws said:

    Mattb02:“On the other hand, if job sprawl is the product of regulation or distortions from tax incentives then Brookings may be right. But since when did government favour sprawl?”

    ws:Tax abatements such as “enterprise zones”, which reduce property taxes for companies in specific zones, and has been a large contributor of companies not “choosing” to go in the city limits. This tool was used to lessen the burden on poorer often inncer-city areas, however, many large companies are utilizing this tool.

    You won’t hear ROT or Karlock complain of this (Hillsboro, OR, home to the silicon forest of Intel, Solar World, etc.), but watch out, if a TOD got a tax abatement, then all hell breaks loose!

    A major issue with land being cheaper on urban fringes is the development of a federal highway system that brought rural land into the marketplace. An overwhelmingly massive amount of wealth was redistributed from the city to the rural edges – opening up the gates.

    Though, we’re told by some people that these are “market forces” at work.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

  11. 11 On April 7th, 2009, Owen McShane said:

    Given the spread of “Place Based Planning” or “Place Making” (the successor to Smart Growth) I am not surprised that a new group of researchers are now complaining about “job sprawl” because Place Based Planning sets out to do for Commercial and Industrial centres (ie employment centres) what Smart Growth did for residential use.

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 7:57 pm

  12. 12 On April 7th, 2009, the highwayman said:

    Owen McShane said: Given the spread of “Place Based Planning” or “Place Making” (the successor to Smart Growth) I am not surprised that a new group of researchers are now complaining about “job sprawl” because Place Based Planning sets out to do for Commercial and Industrial centres (ie employment centres) what Smart Growth did for residential use.

    THWM: Owen, don’t complain about the fallout after you set off a bomb!

    posted on April 7th, 2009 at 8:06 pm

  13. 13 On April 8th, 2009, Dan said:

    That is just the market doing what it does best — adjusting to the most efficient arrangements.

    No.

    They are not the most efficient arrangements. Well, maybe for the car lobby that this site promotes and fetishizes about.

    Thanks!

    DS

    posted on April 8th, 2009 at 11:35 am

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