First, I’m starting off with the assumption that sprawl* is a Bad Thing. I assumed some might have opposing views, hence the forum.
So, there’s the negative impact on the environment due to the reliance on automobiles and the destruction of green space in order to build roads and parking lots. Then there’s the problem that since the poor, who are less likely to have reliable transportation, have more trouble getting to work, school, and the like. And of course, public transportation is less efficient since everything is so spread out.
I’m sure more arguments can be made against it, those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.
So, how would you propose to deal with it? Better city/neighborhood planning for future development is of course a good solution, but what about the sprawl that currently exists? Raze everything and begin anew?
*Sprawl here, loosely defined, means single use zoning, so work is separate from home is separate from recreation is separate from school is separate from stores etc. Low population density, tremendous reliance on automobiles for transportation, little “walkability.” I understand this is largely an American phenomenon since, compared to Europe, much more of America has been developed since the introduction of the automobile.
While this anti-sprawl thinking is intuitive, it actually isn’t true. Actual evidence that high density, mixed-use development may lead to more pollution from automobiles. The key is to realize that pollution doesn’t depend only on how many miles people drive, but also on the type of driving. If people spend a lot of time idling in traffic, they’re adding pollution without going anywhere. A person who drives 20 miles to work on the highway may pollute less than person who drives 10 miles to work but spends a lot of time stuck in traffic. Because high density, mixed-use development tends to lead to traffic congestion, it can actually cause more pollution.
As for ‘destruction of green space’, that’s true almost by definition, but should be kept in perspective. Total development takes up only about 3% of the land in the lower 48, and I’d guess less in other countries. Compared to the amount used by agriculture and the military, that’s not big. Conservationists would do better to focus on those things.
“Better” planning can actually turn out to be worse, and examples are given in the article I linked to. If a city council passes a law declaring that all development within city limits must be mixed-use, developers will simply begin building outside city limits, and people will end up driving farther than ever before. It’s happened all over the place. The basic fact is that people like living in suburbs that are zoned for residential use only, because such suburbs generally offer low property prices, low cost of living, low taxes, low crime, functioning services, and good schools. The best thing to do is probably to learn to live with it.
Here’s a USDA report on land use from 2002 which may be what ITR is referencing. 23% is used for cropland and 30% is “grassland pasture & range.” It gives some breakdowns on cropland and urban use down the page. I don’t know the subject so I’ll let others draw the conclusions.
What you should look at first is why people want to live where they live. Addressing those issues would probably help you in solving the sprawl issue rather than forcing people to live where you think they should without any concern over what they want.
Mobility is a two-edge sword. I’ve lived in the same house for 25 years. During that time I had one employer move from a nearby suburb to downtown, one employer move from a 10-minute bus ride to one that required a much longer ride with transfers and one employer that at one point had access to public transportation, then the route was canceled. My wife was a teacher and transfered from one school to another in the opposite direction. Were we supposed to move every time one of us had a job change?
I don’t see how any land-use plan can take into account job changes, employers who either close down or outgrow their present facilities, or the ripple effect caused by mass transit refocusing its resources.
I’ve done a fair amount of study on the old streetcar system in St. Louis. The old “streetcar suburbs” were indeed planned, mixed use communities relying on public transit. The towns that weren’t planned were classic small towns with schools, shops and work all within walking distance. The entire system came apart at the seams as soon as the automobile was introduced in the 1920s. This suggests to me that, even with the infrastructure already in place, a huge number of people prefer what you call “sprawl.”
Eventually we’ll cover the entire US. If you look at, for instance, Japan on Google Earth, you’ll note that the big grey thing that is Tokyo extends halfway across an island the size of California.
The problem is population. You need to cap it or eventually it’s going to expand until it can’t any more.
That’s a rather misleading statistic. The US and Russia have wide swaths of land that are prairie or otherwise naturally unforested. Europe was probably already mostly cleared of forest before Japan was even introduced to the modern world.
Forests aside, the key point is that in no other nation that I’ve seen (except maybe Russia?) can a lower middle class person own a house with a yard. That becomes impossible as the population density increases. Japan may have forests, but they don’t have personal houses unless you’re in the top 5% or whatever. And to many people, the American Dream pretty much means exactly the ability to own a house with a yard in a modern nation. That only survives for as long as there’s still room to do that.
Look at the US in Google Earth sometime. We will never cover the entire US. It’s physically impossible unless our population balloons to 3 billion. And even then, appropriate high rise housing could probably be built to hold them all and still leave room for farmland, Yosemite and various other things.
ETA: A few months ago, Circuit City closed 567 stores across the country. Other companies are doing the same. Before people worry about covering it all, shouldn’t the nation’s storefronts be full first?
Something that bugs the hell out of me is all of the empty shopping centers everywhere. This is particularly true in Montgomery, where directions are routinely given with the phrase “used to be” (“go to where Sam’s Club used to be, then left to where the Carmike 12 was and it’s next to the empty Kinkos building”) but it’s also a problem many other places. Montgomery also has a large shopping mall with a carousel and copious skylights and in perfect condition physically that’s 90% abandoned due to “white flight” and the city sprawling eastward.
I think that building new shopping centers when there are perfectly good ones sitting empty and still in perfectly good condition (or at very least a fraction of the work to put them in perfectly good condition as building new ones) is a waste of green space and majorly encourages congestion. One thing I would do is give major tax incentives to new stores who would occupy an existing and empty 50,000 square foot store rather than build a new one. True it may mean that the customers have to drive a mile or even two further, but “if you build it AND you have good prices, they will come”.
Another problem with Montgomery, which is a textbook case of suburban sprawl for a city so small (about 300,000 metro), is the downtown area has essentially no residences. It’s a pity: there are some beautiful old buildings downtown- some antebellum and some Queen Anne and Italianate- that may have a sandwich shop or a pharmacy downstairs but have 2 stories upstairs that’s completely vacant. Some of these would be perfect for lofts. Until people live downtown it’s never going to be at all vibrant, and currently 90% of the businesses close at 5:00/6:00 p.m. and on weekends.
If the city would help developers make loft apartments by creating more off-street parking and giving tax credits for renovation (Alabama already has ridiculously low property taxes) I think there are people who would move into the downtown area.
Actually, it kind of is true. And kind of isn’t. It’s mainly because in the USA we have developed a model where even cities are sprawled. I’ve been working in a town in Germany that is about 40,000 people. I can walk anywhere in the city. People still drive, but they also ride their bikes, take the bus, and it’s relatively simple to get into the neighboring big city, where people also walk and mostly take public transportation to get around. Work places tend to be congregated into clusters where people can use public transport, walk or carpool into work.
But in the United States, that same 40,000 person city, like the city where my parents live, is spread over miles and miles of space. You can ride your bike, although you’re risking your life a bit, since there are no bike paths or even sidewalks in a lot of the area. It is virtually impossible to take public transport into one of the nearby large cities, and very annoying and somewhat impractical to take public transport into one of the other large, nearby cities. Work places are spread willy-nilly and most people drive past one another to work places that are often on the other end of town, or many towns away.
What I found most interesting, when I compared these two places, the German one actually has a lower population density, it’s just the way that it’s laid out. A very large portion of the population is clustered right in the center, then there are fields and such around the edges. In my folks town it’s random, haphazard, with mostly unplanned growth and acquisition of outlying areas by incorporation.
Now, to be fair, the town in German is really old, going back at least 800 years, while the town in Florida is just over 100 years old. The town in Germany has a high percentage of their business in the city center, an area of about 6 blocks in any direction, with people living above and around many of the businesses. There is an old city wall which still rings half of the area. There are designated pathways and very few single family houses with large yards. People flood into the town center on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when local markets with fresh produce are set up, or to buy their bread, meats, and other items.
Now, there are definitely some downsides to the German model; I don’t want to claim it’s Utopian. But it is possible to have dense population clusters that eliminate sprawl and encourage less driving, even make it possible to do many things on foot.
I work in Finance for a supermarket company. A big part of my job is evaluating new sites for our stores. It is almost always much more expensive to put our stores onto existing sites in built up areas, than to build in new sites in the suburbs. Like 20-30% more expensive. The city governments have a totally different approach to development than the suburban ones do. They may pay lip service to having a supermarket open in the city to serve an underserved population, but once you go to build there, everyone has their hand out. We spend millions of dollars on stuff that has nothing to do with building or operating the store. If you don’t use a general contractor who is “in” with the local authorities, you can forget about getting the permits and inspections. Plus everyone has “suggestions” about who you should hire for everything, both during the construction phase and after the store opened.
As an example we abandoned a site in a major east coast city, when we found that as the price for building the store, the city wanted us to renovate a decrepit adjoining park, pay to upgrade parts of the water and sewer system, and pay for roadwork to widen the road so that the traffic going into and out of our store wouldn’t impact traffic on the street. And this was to go into a site where another supermarket had been a few years earlier. Wonder why they left in the first place?
In the suburbs the county governments are actively courting us to build more stores. All the infrastructure is provided, and you might even get a tax holiday for a few years.
You are never going to get rid of suburban sprawl simply because most people like having a house and a yard. And if they can afford it, whose to say they can’t live there?
That said, many cities could do a better of managing their existing infrastructure so it doesn’t turn into abandoned “greyfield” space.
Flint, MIis actually demolishing large swaths of city that are no longer sustainable and Detroit is basically allowing nature to retake many parts of that city.
The city of Hoboken, NJ has about the same population but it is compacted into about one square mile. There are no houses. It’s all multi family walk-ups and luxury appartment towers. There is a major rail hub and bus, subway (PATH) and ferry service to Manhattan, Newark, Jersey City and the surrounding area.
The first step to getting sprawl under control is simple (not easy, but simple): Political consolidation of the suburbs with the cities. Suburbanites should not be allowed to lived next door to a city and enjoy all the advantages of that while being beyond the reach of city taxing authorities. If annexed, they also have a vote in the city government. And a consolidated metro government can plan future growth – and mass-transit systems – more effectively.
