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Category Archives: Regional planning

Strong Towns: If a Little Is Good, More Must Be Better

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Guest post by Charles Marohn

There is no question that the greatest force that shapes the form of American cities is transportation. And, since the National Defense and Highways Act of 1956, the federal government has dictated that the country’s transportation system would be based almost exclusively on the automobile. While we won’t overlook the improved standard of living and prosperity this has created, we do argue that we have long since crossed the threshold of diminishing returns on this approach. If America is to have true prosperity going forward, we need to reexamine our transportation investments and the land use pattern they induce and choose approaches that pay a higher rate of return.

America’s cities of the industrial era are sometimes romanticized by the ill-informed. While “efficient” from a pure land-use standpoint, these were not places of prosperity for the masses. Living conditions were horrid by today’s standards, with poor sanitation and environmental quality leading to rampant disease and high mortality rates. No American today would desire to live in such a place.

There were two groups of people, however, that avoided the urban suffering of the industrial era. The first was the wealthy, who could live on larger properties in and on the outskirts of town and, during the most suffocating times for one’s health, could escape entirely to the countryside. The second were farmers. While a tough life, farmers avoided what Thomas Jefferson called the “pestilence to the health” found in the city.

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Federal Highways and Urban Form

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Note: This is the first of what may become a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.

Many opponents of low-density suburbs — areas they derisively call “sprawl” — argue that Americans would not have chosen to live in such areas unless they were subsidized or forced to do so. One of the most important such subsidies, they claim, is the Interstate Highway System.

“For more than a generation,” argues former Milwaukee Mayor and current head of the Congress for the New Urbanism John Norquest, “urban sprawl sprung up with federal assistance [such as] excessive road building . . . that interfered with the free market.” He adds that, “urban superhighways should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.”

Would our cities look a lot different if the federal government had not built the urban interstates (which were the first major urban highways built with federal assistance)? I argue that the differences would be minor.

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Dueling PowerPoint Shows

By | | Regional planning
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Last week, the Antiplanner engaged in a cordial debate with Chuck Kooshian of the Center for Clean Air Policy about whether smart growth — compact development combined with transit improvements — is a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can watch the video below and download the slideshows used by Mr. Kooshian and the Antiplanner.

Mr. Kooshian made a good point in his rebuttal. The Antiplanner critiqued a study called Growing Cooler, which assumed that new cars built after 2020 would always average just 35 mpg, when much higher averages were possible and even likely. Mr. Kooshian pointed out that his own study assumed that new cars in 2030 would get 55 mph.
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Still, the Antiplanner pointed out, Mr. Kooshian’s study did not compare the cost-effectiveness of smart growth vs. even more fuel-efficient cars, and one MIT study estimated that building new cars average 69 would be cost-effective by 2030. Beyond this, I’ll let the video and presentations speak for themselves.

Living the Dream

By | | Regional planning
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David Owen, a writer for the New Yorker, thinks that New York City is the greenest place in America. He urges everyone to live like New Yorkers do: smaller, closer, and driving less.

New Yorkers certainly drive less than other Americans. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they live greener. For one thing, their transit system uses lots of energy and the power for it emits lots of pollution and CO2. I haven’t reviewed Owen’s book, so I don’t know how much analysis went into his claim that New York is greener than elsewhere.

But here are two people who are living Owen’s dream: they own a 175-square-foot room that used to be the maid’s room of someone’s luxury apartment. They eat out for all of their meals, “store” their clothes at the dry cleaners (which must mean they have they dry cleaned every night — how green is that?), and look forward to the day when they can afford a Murphy bed so as to free up the one-third of their room that is devoted to a bed.

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The Compact City Myth

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Can smart growth — compact development combined with alternatives to the automobile — play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Five recent studies — from the Urban Land Institute, Center for Clean Air Policy, Brookings Institution, Cambridge Systematics, and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) — argue that it can.

Today, the Cato Institute releases a review of these five reports that shows that smart growth is an expensive and risky way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions that will take decades to implement and even longer to determine whether or not it is working.

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Compact Cities Won’t Save the Planet

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Several recent reports from the smart-growth crowd have argued that U.S. cities must be rebuilt to higher densities in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Antiplanner will have more to say about these reports in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, a new analysis from MIT concludes that “even moderate carbon-reduction policies now can substantially lower the risk of future climate change.” However, the report adds, “quick, global emissions reductions would be required in order to provide a good chance of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius.”

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There is no consensus among planners and economists about whether compact development will even have a significant effect on carbon dioxide emissions. Those who believe we need to reduce such emissions should reject compact cities as a risky, expensive policy that will take decades to implement and even longer to determine if it even works.

Baby Boomers Heading for the Country

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble

By | | Regional planning
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Tomorrow, the Cato Institute publishes a report titled “How Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble.” Faithful readers of the Antiplanner can download a preview copy today.

This report will probably not change the minds of any Antiplanner readers, but there are still lots of people who think that the United States as a whole suffered a housing bubble in the last several years. As the report shows, there were clear bubbles in fewer than 20 states, most of which had some form of growth-management planning (see table 1 on pp. 12 and 13).
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Those who claim the bubble was caused by low interest rates, easy credit, or similar national causes have to explain why fast-growing states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas did not have a bubble. Remarkably, according to data published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, housing prices never declined in such major (and relatively unregulated) metropolitan areas as Houston and Dallas. If there was a national housing bubble caused by the Federal Reserve Bank or some other central authority, this could hardly be the case.

Compact Development Won’t Save the Planet

By | | Regional planning
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Though they put a good face on it, advocates of smart growth will find little to cheer about in a new report from the National Academy of Sciences on using compact development to reduce driving and greenhouse gas emissions. The report says that, if three-quarters of all new and replacement housing is built at twice current densities, it would reduce driving and related CO2 emissions by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050.

Hardly anyone thinks that even the most restrictive government planning can double the density of 75 percent of new development. As a summary of the report given at a congressional hearing this week noted, the committee that wrote the report (most of whom are fairly objective people) “disagreed about the plausibility of extent of compact development and policies needed to achieve high end estimates.”

If a more reasonable figure of 25 percent is used, then CO2 emissions from driving would be just 2 percent less. Since driving autos accounts for only about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a 2 percent reduction from that is pretty small.

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Imperial Washington

By | | Regional planning
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Much has been written about how the recession has led to a transfer of power from Wall Street to Washington, and you might think this is a good thing if you are naive enough to think Washington is more democratic than markets. But Joel Kotkin points out something even more serious: power is shifting from all American cities to Washington.

Wall Street traders might have, for a time, captured a greater share of national wealth than they once did. But they never tried to tell the rest of us where to live, how to travel, or what kind of jobs can locate in your city. Washington is poised to do just that.

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