Category Archives: News commentary

The Wall Street Journal reports that the nation’s gasoline consumption has dropped by 1.1 percent from the previous year’s levels. No doubt the end-of-the-suburbs crowd will use this to justify their claims.

Are Americans ready for $4 a gallon gas?
Flickr photo by slworking2.

The problem is that, though people may be buying less gasoline, they aren’t driving any less. According to the latest report from the U.S. Department of Transportation, driving through October of 2007 was almost exactly the same as in 2006, which was a little more than in 2005.

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The Atlantic has joined the chorus of those who say that suburbs are declining as everyone who is anyone will soon move back to the cities. In The Next Slum, New Urbanist Christopher Leinberger predicts that many of our suburbs will turn into slums as people of wealth and income return to high-density, mixed-use developments.

The Antiplanner has addressed this issue at least once before. To make sure there isn’t any confusion, I don’t really care whether people move back to the cities or not. I just think it is foolish, wasteful, and intrusive for state and local governments to base their land-use policies on the assumption that Leinberger is right.

Belmar row houses “from the mid 300s.”
Photo taken by Jennifer Lang in January 2007.

For example, Leinberger extolls Belmar, a mixed-use development in Lakewood Colorado “built on the site of a razed mall.” Housing there, he says, “commands a 60 percent premium per square foot over the single-family homes in the neighborhoods around it.”

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A Seattle blogger has a skeptical view of the notion that Seattle, or any city, should try to become denser the way Vancouver and Portland have done. Knute Berger, aka Mossback, argues that Seattle’s density “policies are making the city more unaffordable. They are helping to drive the poor out of town. They are displacing long-standing communities. They are changing the scale of a once-egalitarian city that featured few poor people, few rich people, and a lot of folks in between. This old middle class Seattle is now seen as unsophisticated, not worthy of protection, backward even.”

Mossback points to another blog that celebrates the fact that Seattle is now the only city in the Northwest that has more multi-family housing than single family. Whoopee! We’ve made housing so expensive that we’ve reduced the quality of life for a majority of our people.
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The Antiplanner makes no secret of the fact that he thinks the density mania is even more insane than the rail transit mania. I am glad that another blog, Crosscut.com, has people who feel the same way. And Mossback is not the only one.

The Antiplanner is obviously not doing his job or Popular Science magazine would not have named Portland the nation’s “greenest city.” As befitting the “science” in its name, the magazine arrived at this conclusion quantitatively. But as befitting the “popular” in its name, it seems to have skewed the data to arrive at a predetermined outcome.

PopSci, which once featured fantastic visions of the future promising, among other things, propellor-driven automobiles, propellor-driven trains, and propellor-driven snowmobiles, now takes a grim view of the future that demands we all “green up” by reducing our mobility and energy consumption. The magazine relied on four criteria for its rankings: the percentage of electricity that comes from renewable resources, the percentage of workers who don’t drive, the number of buildings certified as “green,” and how comprehensive the city’s recycling program is. The first two were given twice the weight of the second two.

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