Assuming urban sprawl is a bad thing, how would you incentivize its reversal? Downtown real estate tends to be either expensive or undesirable.
Thanks,
Rob
I thought it was already happening naturally. Isn’t there a concern that the suburbs are declining and people are moving back into cities?
But if your goal was to get people to move from the suburbs back to the cities, I’d suggest raising gas taxes. This would increase the cost of commuting and encourage people to live close to where they work.
Depends on the city. Toronto is growing. Detroit is not.
If you want to incentivize living in cities, flubbering around with the value of real estate is a dumb approach. Your best bet is to do the things that big cities need to do, and do them well; provide mass transit, quality services, green spaces, and public safety.
To cut down on sprawl; Little Nemo hits in right on the head; DE-incentivize sprawl, beginning with higher prices on driving. More gas taxes and toll roads.
I live in the 'burbs and I’m 100% behind hiking gasoline taxes and tolling roads. People should pay for those things. It would not move me into the city - I ain’t giving up my kids to save on some road tolls - but there it is.
You would implement a tax on suburbs used to subsidize the cities. There are many specific methods to do this, from simply raising property taxes on suburbs and giving the money to cities to raising gas taxes and spending the money on public transit, but the end result is the same.
Look at failing cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, etc. Then do the opposite.
Seems simple enough.
Is it inappropriate to ask here why urban sprawl is considered such a bad thing? I have some vague guesses, but feel like I’ve missed something important in the reasoning behind the war on the suburbs.
Raise income taxed in cities, remove out of city state taxes used to fund city works. Add more tax incentives for first time home buyers, build more highways and ramps, raise taxes on businesses in cities, reduce on-street parking and add taxes to paid parking. Oh wait, you want to reverse urban sprawl? Why on earth would you want to do that?
I would agree with this. Instead of trying to bully people into living in a shithole, provide higher density environments that aren’t shitholes for them to live in.
Bears with flamethrowers.
I think the real issue is it is almost impossible to incentivize moving out of the suburbs for a significant portion of the population. If you are young and single, or even middle aged and childless as a couple, urban living has a ton of positives. But even among this cohort (which represent the core of the “new urbanites” who have brought money and gentrification back to downtown city spaces) there are a ton of people that want to be there but simply can’t, because they aren’t willing to live in a 300 sq. ft. studio when they can get 2-3 bedrooms 15 minutes further out for cheaper.
Downtown space is in direct competition with high rise office buildings and major retailers, entities which pay vast amounts of money and thus residential properties in the same area are going to be sitting on very expensive land. Land that you would be almost insane to build apartments on price for a single middle class person to live in affordably, because it’s such desirable land you’d rather turn it into another office and make more money OR turn it into an upper middle class/professional or upper class/rich apartment/condo complex and rake in even more money.
Downtown is too expensive for many. For those that can afford it, it’s often only an option if they do not intend to have families. This is because of limited space. Most cities I’ve lived in you could literally quintuple the price of gas and people in the “near suburbs” still come out vastly ahead in terms of price/sq. ft. of living space. Now for some of the “far exurbs”, people who commute over an hour one way to get to work, it may be different. Also in many areas the way school districts are funded and ran, urban schools (even in gentrified areas) often have horrible quality versus the suburban schools. There are exceptions absolutely, but a lot of urban schools are genuinely worse than their suburban counterparts for a variety of reasons (that could be a whole thread in and of itself.)
If you read through this 690 post thread (that you started, coincidentally), you’ll see that it’s considered a bad thing because there are negative environmental impacts, apparently it causes obesity, and wars for oil, affluent people should mix with lower income people to set an example, and because people who live in suburbs do so because they are racist. Go figure.
Change the zoning laws to classify large swaths of land as “construction free” zones, where no commercial construction at all or any residential construction with 1/4 mile of the next residence will be allowed for 99 years
with an additional 99 year option.
Change the zoning laws to classify many swaths of existing commercial land with strip malls on it as “reclamation only” where ownership of the land reverts by eminent domain back to the state within 30 years and must
be cleared of any/all structures prior to the hand-over date and starting 5 years before the hand over date.
Someone told me once that Vermont did something similar.
If my plan can’t be approved, I fully support your idea. Aim for all construction equipment and pick-up trucks FIRST.
Eugene, Oregon, tried a program of in-fill … and this was opposed to expanding the city limits. The basic idea was to relax the “one house per lot” for lots above a certain square footage and allow ‘mother-in-law’ cottages to be built out in the back.
It certainly hasn’t helped to alleviate the chronic housing shortages there, but it has jacked the price up for existing houses and lots, [ka’ching]. Part of the motivation comes from the very strong level of environmental concerns. However the State has some very high bars to hurdle for a city to annex agricultural lands. Springfield next door abuts forest lands and these are generally easier to get included in city limits.
at some point, punitive measures like gas taxes might backfire by encouraging people to have a “weekday residence” and a “weekend residence.”
I see this in the Seattle a fair amount among people who want to live on the San Juan islands. Commuting every day by ferry is a $50/day round trip that takes perhaps three hours. So you parlay that $1000/month expense into a tiny studio apartment near your job in Seattle. You sleep there Monday-Thursday and then ferry home for the weekend. If you can telecommute for part of your job, or get a flexible schedule like 4 10-hr days, so much the better.
While this might solve some problems (like reducing carbon footprint), it makes the problem of sprawl worse. Not only would many people have two residences, but a two-hour commute twice a week might seem better than half an hour every day, thus increasing the radius of urban sprawl.
Oregon has very strict zoning laws … no buildings of any kind in the Forestry Zones … Agriculturally Zoned land have to prove a certain level of gross receipts in agricultural product sales or you can’t even build a home there. One has to be actively farming the land to build. The smallest lots available for residential buildings outside city limits is 5 acres, which is typical, but I’ve seen it at 20 acres in some places.
We saw what California was doing … and we passed laws to stop that.
Yep. I’m for it. If conservatives really mean it when they say they are generally against higher taxes because of disincentivizing work, this should be a tax they like:
This is politically even more difficult, but I am for allowing parents to send their children to schools in adjoining districts.
It depends on the city, but the cheaper neighborhood fifteen minutes further out can be a dense area served by electrified rail transit and an easy walk to parks and shopping.
Remove the Americans with Disabilities Act, or at least part of it.
The ADA requires that any two-storey restaurant, store, office building, etc… have an elevator (with a very few exceptions). Elevators are expensive. Hence the ADA gives a financial motivation for sprawl to expand outwards rather than upwards.
In a free society, the only way is to make central cities more attractive than the alternative. We’re starting to see that with big employers who need the talents of millennials, but it’s a big ship to turn.
The problem with a huge hike in gas taxes is their regressive nature (they’re not related at all to ability to pay). There’s a disproportionate impact on the rural poor, who now outnumber the urban poor.
Many millions of Americans live in rural counties with virtually no agriculture, few good jobs, and no transportation other than whatever old cars and trucks they can keep running. School is 20 miles in one direction, Grandma’s free day care is 15 miles in the other, and the job at the new prison or the antique mall is 40 miles down the highway. Taking even more of their meager funds to punish them for not living in a big city with subsidized buses seems especially cruel.
Arming bears, huh? It’s in the Constitution!
You just caused housing costs to skyrocket. The people hurt most by your plan are the poorest among us.
I’m of the opinion that hiking gas taxes is a great idea, personally, but this is clearly the major downside.
Consequently, I think a gas tax (or a toll structure) has to be relatively revenue-neutral. This is hardly my idea - it’s an idea that’s been championed by people both on the left and right. Hell, Charles Krauthammer has proposed a massive gas tax hike with revenue neutrality and he’s to the right of Benito Mussolini.
Hike gas taxes (this is something that should be done irrespective of urban sprawl, really) but then turn around and offset that revenue with refundable tax credits that claw back at higher income levels. Your rural poor will end up paying the gas tax but won’t be worse off in terms of how many dollars are in their pocket.
People have made similar suggestions for electricity usage - hike the prices and then give the money back to people based on what the AVERAGE person uses. (You’d have to count kids.) That way less power usage is incentivized, but the poor don’t get screwed.