Emily Badger, who is fast becoming the Antiplanner’s favorite writer at the New York Times, has an article this week about how cities are trying not to be like certain other cities. Seattle doesn’t want to be like San Francisco; San Francisco doesn’t want to be like Manhattan. Kansas City doesn’t want to be like Denver.
“You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted),” says Badger. Too bad she had to spoil it by including Houston, which (as she pointed out in a previous article) many people think is the model other big cities should follow.
Part of the problem is that people just don’t like big cities. The same Gallup poll that found that more Americans of all age groups would rather live in rural areas than big cities also found that more Americans of all age classes would rather live in a suburb of a big city than in a big city itself, and that more Americans of all age classes except 18-29 year olds would rather live in a small town than a big city (and among 18-29 year olds the difference was only 1 percent). People dislike big cities because they tend to be more congested, impersonal, and crime-ridden than small cities or suburbs.
Part of the problem that Badger may not recognize is that there are trade-offs. Low-density suburbs, i.e., sprawl, is what makes Houston affordable, and cities that try to stop sprawl soon have expensive housing. Sprawl is also a way to relieve congestion: congestion is really only serious at densities of 3,000 people per square mile or more (or where there are similarly high-density job centers).
Finally, part of the problem is that the policies regional planners adopt to save their cities from becoming like other cities are usually the policies planners in those other regions adopted that made them what they are. Every county in the San Francisco Bay Area adopted urban-growth boundaries in the 1970s (except San Francisco County itself, which has no rural land). So, to keep from becoming like San Francisco, Seattle adopted an urban-growth boundary in the 1980s. For some reason, it didn’t work.
In Portland, the mantra was always “don’t become like Los Angeles” because Los Angeles was congested and unaffordable. As I’ve told many times before, but it bears repeating, in 1994 planners at Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, gathered 1990 census data about the 50 largest urban areas in the United States to see which was closest to the ideal they had for Portland: a high-density region with minimal freeways. Of course, it turned out to be Los Angeles.
The best thing about the pill is always given as per the person s body and how far the samples viagra cialis disorder has affected the person or how adverse the disorder is erectile dysfunction. It adversely hampers the viagra from usa prominent synchronization of the neural networks that affect mood and cognition. It is also grown in southern parts viagra italy of Asia, probably having been introduced by Indian migrants to foreign tropical shores. http://deeprootsmag.org/2019/05/15/frans-de-waals-case-for-animal-emotions/ generic tadalafil from india Clinics specifically treating sports injuries in Monaghan have also opened up. “In public discussions we gather the general impression that Los Angeles represents a future to be avoided,” the planners observed. Yet “with respect to density and road per capita mileage it displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate” in Portland. It never occurred to the planners (who were just doing what they were taught in school) that maybe this meant there was something wrong with their plans.
Of course, Metro’s plans worked. Today Portland is nearly as congested and unaffordable as Los Angeles was in 1990. The planners should be very proud of themselves, especially since other cities today are desperately trying not to become like Portland.
Badger concludes by wondering if it is possible to find a city that has “gotten all of this right: the growth without the congestion, the tech jobs without the homeless crisis, the affordable housing without the sprawl.” She then suggests that the answer is Minneapolis because Minneapolis just repealed single-family zoning.
However, we don’t yet have proof that simply repealing single-family zoning will actually make housing more affordable or, in general, make cities more desirable. (Besides which, with a value-to-income ratio of 3.0, Minneapolis wasn’t really unaffordable in the first place.) What we do know is that Badger and others seem to confuse “sprawl” with “big” in that she thinks Houston is sprawling but Minneapolis is not. Yet the 2010 census found that Houston urban area had an average population density of 3,000 people per square mile while the Twin Cities’ density was 2,600 per square mile, meaning it was more sprawling.
(The city of Minneapolis is denser than the city of Houston, but Houston represents almost half of its urban area while Minneapolis is less than 15 percent. It is likely that a similarly small central portion of the Houston urban area is about as dense as Minneapolis.)
The real solution to urban growth is to stop trying to make it fit some pattern or ideal that probably was obsolete a half a century ago. Let cities and regions be what they want to be. If sprawl allows the suburbs to be more affordable, then the cities will be more affordable too, which in turn will reduce homeless problems. If more jobs move to the suburbs, then most commutes will avoid the congested inner cities. If people have a choice of where to live and work, they will choose what is best for them, not what some planner has decided is best.
”
Besides which, with a value-to-income ratio of 3.0, Minneapolis wasn’t really unaffordable in the first place
” ~ anti-planner
Affordable for whom? Sure, if you’re above average you can get a place in MPLStown without breaking the budget. But if you’re making $17 / hr, it’s going to be tough to find something that you can afford that isn’t in a zip code with double-digits murders every year.
The people who who make $17 are probably the ones voting for the policies & politicians that make those areas double-digit murder zones.
FFS. Talking about ‘crime ridden cities’ is pure slander. Per capita rates for violent crimes are far lower in US cities.
Let cities and regions be what they want to be.
If people have a choice of where to live and work, they will choose what is best for them, not what some planner has decided is best.
Thought no central planner, ever.
mattmiller,
Per capita rates in US cities are far lower than what? According to Wikipedia, rates of violent crime in some major cities, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Oakland, are many times greater than in suburban cities such as Chandler AZ and Irvine CA. That’s one reason why many people prefer suburbs to cities.
Don’t be like Vegas………Hideous as fuck
For the Great Pumpkin’s sake, In 2016 the city violent crime rate in Chicago was higher than the violent crime rate in Illinois by 153%.
For Gaia’s sake, In 2016 the city violent crime rate in Minneapolis was higher than the violent crime rate in Minnesota by 357%.
For Our Lady of Perpetual City Planning’s sake, In 2016 the city violent crime rate in Salt Lake City was higher than the violent crime rate in Utah by by 285.56%.
Thanks CapitalistRoader, that was a great way to share the cold reality of things. IT’s even worse than that as with most violent cities, most of the violence occurs in a few zip codes.
For others, keep in mind that it’s not about how much violent crime, but how much relative to other choices. If you’re living in Jordan in MPLS, finally being able to afford a place in Hiawatha could make a huge difference in your quality of life by getting away from the violence.
For example, nearly half of Jacksonville FL’s homicides in 2016 occured in just 3 zip codes. http://static.jacksonville.com/homicidereport/phone/deadliest-zip-code-32209.html
“Our Lady of Perpetual City Planning’s”
Man, I wish I thought of that one!
Of course, part of the other problem is that as the Section-8 style crime moves all around the cities, even in the suburbs (part of the Obama Administration’s feverish efforts to diversify our hatefully white suburbs with Tyrone’s/Muhammed’s/Garcia-Monolinguez’s wonderful cultural contributions), now it’s just as possible to get a drive-by shooting in Renton or Edmonds as it is on Rainier Ave in Seattle.
Fortunately, HUD Secretary Ben Carson got rid of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing reporting rule, neutering those racist requirements left over from the Obama era. It’s funny how fragile a pen and a phone are compared to legislation.
“St. Louis, Baltimore, and Oakland”
High percentage of African Americans in these cities which also have harsh “drug” penalties. End the war on drugs and these cities look like most others in terms of crime rates. The Antiplanner is notoriously silent when it comes to the correlation between the war on drugs and crime rates.
Just like all the fake libertarians who post here.
Frank, I actually with you there!
Agree
Frank,
the relevant literature has proven over and over that the legal system is not racist, supposedly locking up blacks for decades for smoking a joint. It is well known via FBI crime states that they commit a grossly disproportional amount of the violent crime in any metro area. Those cities mentioned have extremely high murder rates, for example, compared to most other US cities.
a) Criminal justice reform is being championed by the current president and, IIRC, a bill for it has just passed congress. If Frank is correct, then that will help alleviated violent crime
b) I suspect Frank is wrong, “harsh” drug laws are not why St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans are among the most violent cities in the world. The same factors are in play in other cities that have 1/4th the rate. There’s something deeper that gets ingrained in the communities in a bad way. This is why the rate murder rate in St. Louis is 3 times higher than the rate in KCMO and Baltimore’s is 2 1/2 times higher than DC’s.
Either way it’s key to remember that a few US cities murder rates are by far and away much higher than a slew of other major cities. IN fact, it’s so bad in cities like Baltimore and St. Louis that their murder rates are higher than places like Juarez, Mexico or San Salvador or Teguicalapa [sic]. And with the latter 2 we literally have people applying for legal residence in the US to and citing the violence there are a reason. I hope those refugees don’t move to Detroit because they’d literally be just as well off back home in a civil war.
@ LazyReader: “Vegas (is) hideous as fuck”
You do like repeating yourself, don’t you? I repeat too: if you got past the facade where people like you pay for most of our infrastructure, you’d find quite an attractive community. Actually, many attractive communities.
FWIW, so we might appropriately affix a label, where (or what) might you call ‘home’?
Every city has plenty of ugliness
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