Category Archives: Regional planning

Some commenters on this blog still do not believe that growth management makes housing unaffordable. But the premiere of the Australian state of Victoria is convinced otherwise. Over the protests of planners, he has decided to add enough land to Melbourne’s urban-growth boundary to build 134,000 new homes.

This is in response to Melbourne’s extremely high median home prices, which Wendell Cox says are more than seven times median household incomes. (For references, median home prices in Houston — and almost anywhere else that doesn’t have growth management — are about two times median family incomes.)

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Smart Growth has proven so popular that it is time to talk about the next step, which I call Brilliantly Smart Growth. If housing people in mid-rise, mixed-use developments can measurably reduce their daily miles of driving and carbon footprints, just think what higher densities will do.

The median density of America’s urban areas is less than 2,000 people per square mile, while the average density is 2,700 people per square mile. The densest urban areas have more than 6,000 people per square mile. As the Antiplanner has previously noted, increasing densities by 1,000 people per square mile seems to reduce per capita driving by, at most, 395 miles.

We drive an average of 10,000 per capita, which suggests that densities of around 30,000 people per square mile might eliminate driving. But Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and several cities in New Jersey are that dense and people in those communities still drive, so even higher densities are needed to completely eliminate driving.

The Sierra Club once opined that the “optimal urban density” is 500 households per acre. At an average of 2.4 people per household, this equals 1,200 people per acre or 768,000 people per square mile.

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Last Friday, the Antiplanner joined other participants at the Preserving the American Dream conference on a bus tour of Houston. The first half of the tour focused on the downtown-Galleria area, while the second half zipped to the suburbs to see a master-planned community.

This classic bungalow is in a neighborhood of fine homes that are probably protected with deed restrictions.

In the city, we saw stately manors, skinny houses, granny flats, mid-rise housing, and high-rise condos. We saw gated communities with strict covenants, and in areas with no covenants we saw mixed-use, mixed-income, and mixed-density neighborhoods.

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The Preserving the American Dream conference in Houston this past weekend was a lot of fun, but also pretty exhausting. I’ll have more detailed reports in upcoming posts, but for now here is an article about Houston’s housing market by a Federal Reserve Bank economist.

“Given that Houstonians had access to the same new types of mortgages as the rest of the country and that Houston has had greater population growth than other large metros, we might expect price appreciation to be stronger in Houston than elsewhere,” says the article. “However, the opposite has been true.”

The reason? Houston’s lack of zoning and its large supply of land available for development allowed builders to respond to easy credit by increasing the pace of construction. Slow and unpredictable permitting processes prevented builders in many other regions, including Florida and the Pacific Coast states, from similarly stepping up production.

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Lock your barns and get your guns — North Dakota’s precious farmlands are being threatened by urban sprawl. Or so some urban planners would have Dakota residents believe.

In reality, North Dakota is losing population, having declined from 642,000 in the 2000 census to an estimated 639,000 in 2007. But a handful of North Dakota counties have managed to eke out some growth, notably Cass County (home of Fargo) and Burleigh County (home of Bismarck, the state capital). Both are growing at a rate of about 1.5 percent per year, which puts them among the 450 fastest growing counties (out of more than 3,000) in the country. Still, there are plenty of larger counties whose populations are growing much faster.

Despite all its wild growth, Burleigh County still has only 77,000 people (58,000 of whom live in Bismarck). So when the Burleigh County Commission decided to update its 20-year-old comprehensive plan, instead of asking its tiny planning staff to do it, it contracted it out.

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