Debates over smart growth–sometimes known as new urbanism, compact cities, or sustainable urban planning, but always meaning higher urban densities and a higher share of people in multifamily housing–boil down to factual questions. But smart-growth supporters keep trying to twist the arguments into ideological issues.
The choice should be yours: suburbs, or . . .
For example, in response to my Minneapolis Star Tribune article about future housing demand, Thomas Fisher, the dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, writes, “O’Toole, like many conservatives, equates low-density development with personal freedom.” In fact, I equate personal freedom with personal freedom.
. . . New Urbanism. Flickr photo by David Crummey.
Fisher adds, “we [meaning government] should promote density where it makes sense and prohibit it where it doesn’t”; in other words, restrict personal freedom whenever planners’ ideas of what “makes sense” differ from yours. Why? As long as people pay the costs of their choices, they should be allowed to choose high or low densities without interference from planners like Fisher.
Another writer who makes this ideological is Daily Caller contributor Matt Lewis, who believes that conservatives should endorse new urbanism. His weird logic is conservatives want people to love their country, high-density neighborhoods are prettier than low-density suburbs, and people who don’t have pretty places to live will stop loving their country. Nevermind that more than a century of suburbanization hasn’t caused people to stop loving their country; the truth is there are many beautiful suburbs and many ugly new urban developments.
Lewis adds, “Nobody I know is suggesting that big government–or the U.N.!–ought to mandate or impose these sorts of development policies.” He apparently doesn’t know many urban planners, and certainly none in Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, the Twin Cities, or other metropolitan areas where big government in the form of regional planning agencies (though not the U.N.) are doing just that. If new urbanism were simply a matter of personal choice, no one would criticize it.
The real issues are factual, not ideological.
Fact #1: Contrary to University of Utah planning professor Arthur Nelson, most people everywhere prefer low-density housing as soon as they have transport that is faster than walking. While a minority does prefer higher densities, the market will provide both as long as there is demand for them.
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Fact #2: Contrary to Matt Lewis, American suburbanization did not result from a “post-World War II push for sprawl” coming from “the tax code, zoning, a federally financed highway system, and so on.” Suburbanization began before the Civil War when steam trains could move people faster than walking speed. Most American families abandoned transit and bought cars long before interstate highways–which, by the way, more than paid for themselves with the gas taxes collected from the people who drove on them. Nor did the tax code promote sprawl: Australians build bigger houses with higher homeownership rates in suburbs just as dispersed as America’s without a mortgage interest deduction.
Fact #3: Contrary to Thomas Fisher, low-density housing costs less, not more, than high-density. Without urban-growth boundaries or other artificial restraints, there is almost no urban area in America short of land for housing. Multifamily housing costs more to build, per square foot, than single-family, and compact development is expensive because the planners tend to locate it in areas with the highest land prices.
The relative prices I gave in my article–$375,000 for a 1,400-square-foot home in a New Urban neighborhood vs. $295,000 for a 2,400-square-foot home on a large suburban lot–are typical for many smart-growth cities: compare these eastside Portland condos with these single-family homes in a nearby Portland suburb.
Fact #4: Contrary to Fisher, the so-called costs of sprawl are nowhere near as high as the costs of density. Rutgers University’s Costs of Sprawl 2000 estimates that urban services to low-density development cost about $11,000 more per house than services to high-density development. This is trivial compared with the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars added to home prices in regions whose policies promote compact development.
Fact #5: Contrary to University of Minnesota planning professor Richard Bolan, the best way to reduce externalities such as pollution and greenhouse gases is to treat the source, not try to change people’s lifestyles. For example, since 1970, pollution controls reduced total air pollution from cars by more than 80 percent, while efforts to entice people out of their cars and onto transit reduced pollution by 0 percent.
Fact #6: Contrary to Lewis, suburbs are not sterile, boring places. Suburbanites have a strong sense of community and are actually more likely to engage in community affairs than city dwellers.
Fact #7: Smart growth doesn’t even work. It doesn’t reduce driving: After taking self-selection into account, its effects on driving are “too small to be useful.” It doesn’t save money or energy: multifamily housing not only costs more, it uses more energy per square foot than single-family, while transit costs more and uses as much or more energy per passenger mile as driving. When planners say smart growth saves energy, what they mean is you’ll live in a smaller house and have less mobility.
Fact #8: If we end all subsidies and land-use regulation, I’ll happily accept whatever housing and transport outcomes result from people expressing their personal preferences. Too many planners want to control population densities and transport choices through prescriptive land-use regulation and huge subsidies to their preferred forms of transportation and housing.
These planners think only government can know what is truly right for other people. Even if you believe that, government failure is worse than market failure and results in subsidies to special interest groups for projects that produce negligible social or environmental benefits.
If urban planners have a role to play, it is to ensure people pay the costs of their choices. Instead, it is planners, rather than economists such as myself, who have become ideological, insisting density is the solution to all problems despite the preferences of 80 percent of Americans for low-density lifestyles.
Again, I must repeat the sincere beliefs of psychotic government planners:
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”
The Antiplanner wrote:
Fact #2: Contrary to Matt Lewis, American suburbanization did not result from a “post-World War II push for sprawl” coming from “the tax code, zoning, a federally financed highway system, and so on.” Suburbanization began before the Civil War when steam trains could move people faster than walking speed. Most American families abandoned transit and bought cars long before interstate highways–which, by the way, more than paid for themselves with the gas taxes collected from the people who drove on them. Nor did the tax code promote sprawl: Australians build bigger houses with higher homeownership rates in suburbs just as dispersed as America’s without a mortgage interest deduction.
That suburbanization and “sprawl” began long before 1946 is a historical fact that the Smart Growth industry has a very hard time with.
But it is true. Improvements in transportation technology, especially the steam locomotive and the network of electric street railways that grew up in the 19th Century (and years before the first Model T rolled off of Henry Ford’s assembly line in 1908) all contributed to “sprawling” land use patterns.
Fact 2 – While suburbanization started occuring as soon as streetcars enabled people to live farther than they could walk from work, streetcar suburbs such as those that fan out from Boston along the Green Line are much more dense and walkable than the post-World War II suburbs. Sprawl is a lot different then sensible suburbanization and is a product of the past few decades that is accerlerating now.
Saying that multifamily housing is more expensive to build is confusing the cost of the housing with the cost of the land. Higher values of land will always have more multifamily housing than lower values of land just because it makes sense to maximize construction when the land is so valuable. Also, there will be no way for most people to live in San Francisco, Honolulu, New York, etc. except in multifamily housing.
What about a cost of sprawl being that valuable farm land is being replaced with housing even as much land in the inner core is empty? If we are recycling everything else it seems to be good stewards of the environment we should want to recycle land as well.
But I agree that as long as people pay the full costs of their housing they should be able to live wherever they want. Exaction fees do not come close to paying the full cost of greenfield development, and it is the taxpayers who have to pay to widen country roads and country interstates so people can live ever farther from where they work. Charging full exaction fees and a pro-rated cost of adding lanes to your two lane bucolic country road and the four lane rural expressway would go a long way to narrowing the cost gap of a property in the exurbs and a more centrally located one.
The market isn’t all for smart growth, nor is it all for sprawl, The thing for the last 50, 60 years has been that we’ve done nothing but sprawl.
This is the best quote from a September 2013 article regarding single family housing: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2013/09/singlefamily_housing_a_smart_g046939.php.
I don’t have much time today to comment or refute the more obvious mis-statements in The Antiplanner’s list of alleged “facts” except to say that in principle–and contrary to The Antiplanner’s claim about smart growth and new urbanism advocates–many of us do want to see less land use regulation, e.g., easing zoning to make traditional urban forms and mixed land use legal again, and agree that eliminating the most egregious subsidies are warranted. Our main disagreement here is what we believe the magnitude of changes that would occur by easing zoning restriction, and the magnitude of the subsidies that sprawl development currently receives, particularly indirectly through the act of driving.
I also question The Antiplanner’s sense of history; sure, suburban growth was fueled by the growth of commuter trains and streetcars, but also during the same period (mid 19th Century to World War One), industrial cities grew at dramatic rates.
Also, the few empirical studies that measured the impact of new transit services such as the USC study of travel after opening of the Exposition LRT line, and a recent analysis of a TRAX extension to the University of Utah, show that new rail transit services do in fact substantially reduce auto travel. Then there are the long-term trends in Arlington County, VA, where the population has grown by 50,000 over the past few decades, but local auto traffic as measured by ADT on Arlington’s surface arterials are down significantly over this time, with the biggest declines in the corridor where Metro was constructed and the densest transit-oriented development occurred.
But then what’s to protect the residents of a quiet suburban neighborhood from someone building a large apartment complex, a mall, or an oil refinery right next door?
” Exaction fees do not come close to paying the full cost of greenfield development, and it is the taxpayers who have to pay to widen country roads and country interstates so people can live ever farther from where they work.”
In post-Prop 13 California, anyway, property buyers pay the cost of greenfield development infrastructure, either through fees charged to the developer, and passed through to the buyer in the purchase price, or supplemental property taxes for special assessment districts paid directly by the buyer. This is fair, and I didn’t complain about having to pay these costs when I bought a new house in Sacramento, even though those lucky enough to have purchased in earlier generations just paid these costs through their normal property taxes (which, of course, I also paid). In spite of having to pay directly for these development costs, housing still cost substantially less than than in-fill developments closer to downtown.
As for the cost of improving interstates and other major access roads, I suspect the cost of these improvements pales in comparison to that of taxpayer subsidies benefiting transit users.
kens said:
In spite of having to pay directly for these development costs, housing still cost substantially less than than in-fill developments closer to downtown.
Yes, and your driving costs are much higher than those who live in the allegedly more expensive infill developments closer in, e.g., the tradeoff for living “farther out” but obtaining cheaper housing costs. I’ve never known a developer to build anything, housing or otherwise, if they thought they couldn’t make a profit. Those buying “closer in” pay in higher housing prices, but much less in travel costs.
This link: http://communitybuilders.net/the-suburbs-are-back-and-they-are-also-dead-a-look-at-the-national-debate/ has an excellent summary of the dynamics of this “debate”:
So, the market is clearly changing. In comparison to the past 50 years, core walkable development is surging, among other things. But that’s a whole different ball of wax than saying suburbia is dead, or coming to an end [or that the single family market is dead–a claim smart growth and new urbanism advocates have never made…but I digress]. Making these kinds of extreme proclamations might be an effective method of rising above the noise, or titling a book, but it also allows for straw-man backlash from folks like Joel Kotkin, who was recently able to say that suburbia had essentially won, mainly by avoiding its prophesied death.
Try and slay this two-headed dragon and you’re guaranteed to encounter the tropes, name calling, and hackneyed bits that characterize any polarized media showdown, as caricatures from both sides duel it out in what’s (falsely) billed as an ideological death-match. Readers know that neither idea will actually die, but in the meantime a lot of people will likely come away confused, or misinformed, or both.
Sprawl is a lot different then sensible suburbanization and is a product of the past few decades that is accerlerating now.
‘Sensible’ is a pretty vague and loaded word when used in this context. So is ‘sprawl’ for that matter. It is not possible to reproduce the technical and economic conditions that prevailed when the first ‘streetcar’ suburbs were built, so we can’t literally turn back the clock, even if we try to mimic those development patterns.
What about a cost of sprawl being that valuable farm land is being replaced with housing even as much land in the inner core is empty? If we are recycling everything else it seems to be good stewards of the environment we should want to recycle land as well.
Farmland is not not in short supply — certainly not the United States. If it really were more valuable than residential development those new subdivisions would never occur. The households who choose locations at the periphery of metropolitan areas likely do not view central cities as closes substitutes in terms of location. Besides, there are other reasons precluding central city development, including the cost of land assembly and other types of preparations. These are all mitigating factors and, like you said, the reason that most new development in central cities has to take place at higher densities.
Exaction fees do not come close to paying the full cost of greenfield development, and it is the taxpayers who have to pay to widen country roads and country interstates so people can live ever farther from where they work.
Interstates typically have dedicated sources of funding, and most of that funding comes from users. Where development is taking place, most local governments can pay the cost of ‘widening country roads’ — this is a good argument for further decentralizing transportation decisions. What are these ‘full costs’ of greenfield development that are supposedly not being accounted for?
I don’t have much time today to comment or refute the more obvious mis-statements in The Antiplanner’s list of alleged “facts”
Classic Dan the plan and msetty….if you have no facts to back up your ridiculous claim, just say something stupid like “I have no time to refute all this”, and pretend this actually counts as an argument/refutation. Of course, they both say this because they have NOTHING of substance to refute with except sticking their fingers up their butt and sniffing. Msetty has plenty of time to come on here and spew his drivel but no time to “refute” the Antiplanner’s statements, wow what a surprise!
Hey, Metrosucky, here’s rocks in your face, figuratively speaking. I have the facts to do a full rebuttal to Randal’s blog post, and pointing out where his interpretations are wrong, too, but I don’t have an entire day (8 hours) to do that. 30 minutes here and there, perhaps, but not all day when I actually have PAID work to get done for a client, not spend all my time replying to questionable analysis as well as fifth rate Internet trolls like you (as an Internet troll, you’re NOT even that good or effective at it). Sometimes I wonder if you live off Mommy Welfare, including a free den off the basement. I note you do post during the middle of the day, like I can because I’m self employed, like The Antiplanner.
Stop lying about what I say here, you “lying liar” as Al Franken accurately called a well-known junkie, e.g., Rush “Oxycotin” Limbaugh. I supplied sufficient links to people who make a living in the development analysis business and for readers to peruse, but, noooooo, for you that is actually reading information from those who don’t agree with you…plus it resembles “work.”
Msetty, what you supply is laughable “low wattage” (to use a phrase the planner uses) links to planner loving sites like washington post. Stop acting as if you’ve supplied a link from JAMA with a amazing new way to cure cancer.
And you have plenty of time, again, to write long diatribes about how poor planners are so unfairly treated and not allowed to just turn all of US into a density nirvana (which you would not live in due to personal circumstances, you and every other smart growth advocate).
You cannot supply a SINGLE reasoned, not hyper-partisan foaming at the mouth pro-density link to refute ANYTHING Randal said. I bet anything on that. Shit-eating density advocates and their planner psycho buddies.
You don’t do productive work, you create lies and rationales to help governments foist subsidized nightmares on unwilling residents. It’s the same story everywhere. Don’t stick your shit in my nose and claim it doesn’t stink.
Speaking of ideology, no matter how many times we correct the errors in #3, they reappear here, again and again, like zombies. And it seems to be an ideological blind spot in the argumentation here to compare apples to oranges, as in #4 – why is Randal confusing public and private costs? Such an utterly basic mistake, no wonder the comment about “econ 101” was made. And the ideological blinders make Randal forget we already discussed the BTU consumption differences in #7, yet here we go again. And finally, in #8, it must be ideology that causes the rhetorical dishonesty in Too many planners want to control population densities and transport choices through prescriptive land-use regulation , as we’ve discussed here many times.
Ah, well.
DS
Again, more low-wattage claims of “we discussed this before” without any substantiation or anything to back it up. What else can you expect from a lying government planner, and one who doesn’t, and won’t, live the lifestyle he espouses (there’s those inconvenient personal circumstances again!).
As Santayana wrote, “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Restrictive Covenants. Google them. You’ll be amazed.
Good for you Metro.
Dan and Setty are two world class leftist, government money sucking monsters, and need kicking regularly.
transitboy wrote:
Fact 2 – While suburbanization started occuring as soon as streetcars enabled people to live farther than they could walk from work, streetcar suburbs such as those that fan out from Boston along the Green Line are much more dense and walkable than the post-World War II suburbs. Sprawl is a lot different then sensible suburbanization and is a product of the past few decades that is accerlerating now.
So in other words, when the Levittowns and other “sprawling” communities from 1946 through, say, 1973, get to be 100 years old, then you will call them something other than “sprawl?”
Consider the municipality of Takoma Park, Maryland, much beloved by (and home to) many Smart Growth advocates (at least Smart Growth for other people), it grew up in the late 19th Century thanks to the construction of the new B&O Metropolitan Subdivision between Washington, D.C. and Brunswick, Maryland. A look at some of the homs nearest the present-day Takoma Metrorail (Red Line) station, and once the site of a B&O passenger railroad station reveals the following lot sizes from state property tax records:
15,165 SF
16,896 SF
5,752 SF
10,248 SF
14,000 SF
21,918 SF
10,000 SF
10,000 SF
35,000 SF
10,875 SF
Looks like suburban sprawl to me. What does it look like to you?
msetty wrote:
Rush “Oxycotin” Limbaugh
FTFY:
Rush “dope fiend” Limbaugh.
But what does the dope fiend have to do with this discussion?
I am not sure what difference it makes whether dense or non-dense housing is more expensive to build. The market can take care of the allocation of that very well.
If one is really going to list the “unpriced” costs of suburban living, then there also is a huge cost of urban living (that probably is already considered just as much as the suburban living “unpriced” costs). There is the huge huge huge cost of car alarms in the middle of the night. Remodeling or any work on the property is much more costly and difficult to stage. Marriage arguments turn into everybody business and perhaps a police record. Bad smells. Can’t open windows at night because of noise. Corrupt government. Kids can’t play outside.
One other point that is often missed. — the “sterile” suburban life myth. I guess planners just drive around and see some urban people sitting in the front of their house or walking on sidewalks and think that is “vibrant”. Yeah, the suburbs is less of a place that people just hang with their neighbors. But the suburban life involves more sports and church activities, and of course more children activities than the urban world. When have planners actually noticed the churches in the suburbs and considered that people interact there all week long, not just on Sundays (or Saturdays or Fridays)? To a lot of people, church is a social and moral network far more important than a job.
somehow that seems sensible, that the last person advocating the CATO institute’s expressed viewpoint, would be promoting “church” activities (!)
anyways, yes the suburbs from 100 years ago are todays cities… how that supports the idea of unfettered private investment i can’t see… lets all hope we don’t need another triangle shirt factory fire, to remind everyone that even high-density private developments have problems… anyone every heard of miami?
(its in florida)
Like I thought, the liars and cowards Dan and msetty have not provided a single example of a valid rebuttal to anything Randal said. Must be tough when most your sources are freedom hating Nazi’s like Don Nozzi.
It would be nice if we were just allowed to live the way we prefer without being told how we must live. I prefer outside of the city on a big lot, far enough, to be away from the vibrant downtown lifestyle and far enough from my neighbors, so I don’t know what they are doing.
Everyone has differt needs and we have plenty of room for everyone.
msetty says: “Yes, and your driving costs are much higher than those who live in the allegedly more expensive infill developments closer in, e.g., the tradeoff for living “farther out” but obtaining cheaper housing costs.”
This wrongly assumes that I worked in the city center. Like a large majority of workers, I didn’t. But your general point is valid. Any housing choice we make involves trade-offs, and it’s up to each individual to weigh the positives and negatives and make the choice that works best for them. Ideally this could be done without government intervening to sway my choice by favoring one type of development over another. I think that is the whole point of this blog.
If I have a choice between high priced housing and property taxes or higher driving costs, I prefer living outside of downtown and preferable out of the city. It is much more walkable, because I prefer to walk where there aren’t any stores or coffee shops.
The fact remains that proponents of Smart Growth, UGB, Transit Oriented Development, Urban Renewal and all these “services” that municipalities “graciously” force us to accept have one thing in common, and that is their socioeconomic group isn’t the focus of their “plan”. Proponents usually have the economic means to opt-out of the very idealism they force on the rest of us. They can choose to live in the high density, highly subsidized, highly priced condos, upscale urban living, or in the suburbs, but they don’t choose to live in the doldrums of infill, and the neighborhoods that are stuck subsidising their “plan”. I think a great description of the proponents of central planning, Smart Growth, Transit Oriented Development, UGB and Urban Renewal would be hubris.
As I’ve said before, I’d be happy to work with the anti-planner on #8 in LA.
I agree that in places like Minneapolis, planners may be trying to force less single family development and more multi-family. However, it’s pretty much the opposite in Los Angeles, where there are few restrictions on building single-family homes at the periphery. Here, planning is focused on preserving single-family neighborhoods that would quickly turn to multi-family development if people were allowed to express their preferences through the market.
It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
As I predicted, and expected, planners and their friends have not put forth a SINGLE link substantiating their claims. Not one! Now, since we know Dan and msetty are all over it whenever they can find some ridiculous editorial providing a little cover for their claims, this concludes that they got nothing, nothing! What a bunch of liars, cowards, and frauds. Nothing but shills for corrupt developers, politicians, and thugs who would like to see the entire country reworked to fit their myopic vision of how Things Should Be.
Yep metrosucks – they can’t sell it to those like me who are force to live it, because those truths they tell are proven to be lies everyday. There dream of infill housing to increase density in our socioeconomic group, that they refuse to live in, is HELL on earth.