No, that’s simply not true. In my state, suburban sprawl is independent of cities. There are zero resources that cities have access to that are more efficient than suburbs.
So, if there were less people in the area, there would be less of a demand on local resources.
Genius I tell you. Genius.:smack:
Too many people in too small a foot print.
No, you’re wrong. The problem is that Atlanta is a sprawl. Atlanta is actually the perfect counter-example to your point.
They aren’t suburbs if they aren’t part of a metropolitan area. A suburb by definition is a satellite of a larger urban area.
From wiki:
Suburbs are commonly defined as smaller residential communities lying immediately outside a city.
You still havent defined sprawl.
Except perhaps its growth YOU dont like where people dont walk everywhere.
If you can’t get over the personal validation argument I am no longer going to respond to you. This is the last response, if you make another comment about personal preference and its validity I will not respond to any more of your posts in this thread. Got it? At this point everyone but you is talking about the issue.
It’s also not incumbent ONLY on me to define sprawl. How would YOU define sprawl?
This is how I define sprawl: Urban sprawl - Wikipedia As has been defined in precisely those terms in at least one if not more other posts before this.
I’m afraid I don’t have the patience of mswas. billfish678 insists on personalizing this as attack on teh burbz and Magiver keeps trying to make his point using the standard SDMB back of the napkin cherry pick analysis where you make ups some arbitrary scenario out of some numbers and try to obfuscate the point by focusing on the minutae.
I would like someone to explain how they think a population of 8 million people in single family homes spread over the entire state of New Jersey or Deleware can possible be as efficient in terms of it’s use of energy, resource or it’s footprint on the econsystem as a population condensed into 15 square miles. All of their resources come from somewhere else so that is a moot point.
Show me actual numbers from a reputable source.
They keep saying, "but the trees! Not recognizing that having 15 square miles of fewer trees means you can have lots more trees spread over the 150 square miles you are not using.
Sam Stone I’d like to say you put together a quality argument, and I hope to get back to it later and address it in more detail.
Sam Stone My initial thought on your post was that you are arguing from potential. You are saying that the suburbs COULD be more efficient if the money was spent differently, but because that money ISN’T then they aren’t more efficient. You make a good case as to what the solutions to suburban sprawl are in your argument, but you present it as a counter-point to the ‘densely packed cities are more efficient’ argument, which it’s not, because you are talking about potentialities and not present realities.
I am not complaining about “sprawl”, YOU are. Tell me your troubles mate…
I dont define sprawl. Its nonsensical.
You might as well complain about national forest sprawl. Or farmland sprawl. Or high rise sprawl. Or park sprawl. Or theater sprawl. Or shopping center sprawl. Or chinese resteraunt sprawl. Its all a matter of perspective.
People build where they want to in a way they can afford to and/or want to pay for. Unless you just want to complain about growth in general, which is a whole nother can of worms.
You guys really want to define/complain how OTHER people should/do spend THEIR money on their living arrangements.
Remember way back when you said it had nothing to do with resource consumption or energy usage? Well, thats mostly what you guys have been harping on ever since.
I DON’T CARE if it (suburbs) takes more land (duh). I also don’t care if it takes more resources per capita (if it does). If you earned the dough, spend it as you see fit.
If you want to complain that suburbs, cities, or urbs or whatever arent quite as walking friendly (statistically) as they could be, go ahead. I could agree to that.
But spread out living (or even city living for that matter), if most people are going to have to walk more than a short distance, they are gonna drive, take a bus, taxi, or subway. Those are ALL “worse” for the environment than walking (and maybe not even then). Most people arent australian aboriganies looking for their next walkabout. If they were that would be great. But I aint gonna push my lifestyle preferences on somebody else.
Yeah, that sneaky Magiver guy actually trying to use real numbers and doing a calculation or two…:rolleyes:
For the record, I think his point is besides the point, but he’s doing calculus compared to your guys hand waving about the “obvious”. If its SO obvious, your numbers should just fall in your lap.
Now you’re trying to split hairs to win an argument. But lets look at your cite:
Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is the spreading of a city and its suburbs over [COLOR=“Red”]rural land at the fringe of an urban area.[1] Residents of sprawling neighborhoods tend to live in single-family homes and commute by automobile to work. Low population density is an indicator of sprawl. Urban planners emphasize the qualitative aspects of sprawl such as the lack of transportation options and pedestrian friendly neighborhoods. Conservationists tend to focus on the actual amount of land that has been urbanized by sprawl[/COLOR].[1]
We’re discussing urban land that is converted to single-family homes populated by people who commute to work by car. If you want to state that a buffer of farm land between your definition of a suburb and other housing developments is somehow different in this debate then state your argument.
I’ve provided you hard evidence of the inefficiencies of cities which you simply ignored. Stacking people like chord wood may seem efficient on the surface but it simply means resources have to be brought in from greater distances at a greater cost. When water costs 50 times more than less dense communities then that money is taken out of the economy without additional benefit.
Lets look at housing. When you build an apartment building of any size it involves a steel frame which requires using finite natural resources and a tremendous amount of energy. The water manifolds in these buildings are also forged from metal and require a master standpipe to the roof, a separate sprinkler system, and an additional water tower. This if for each building. Compare this to a modern frame home made with renewable wood, PVC sewer lines and plastic water lines. A tremendous savings in manufacturing resources over water systems in buildings.
New suburban houses can be made highly efficient with solar electric, solar heating and geothermal heating/cooling. Older homes can be retrofitted with the same technology. With the new thin film solar technology, it is now possible to roof a house with solar cells as active weather protection versus adding it to a shingled roof. Cities don’t have the luxury of this level of technological advancement. It’s not possible to match single family housing for efficiency.
The best way to deal with urban sprawl is not better plan suburban communities in the future. Perhaps smaller yards, fewer McMansions, and better ways to plan things like water consumption, sewage disposal, etc. We’re not going to start tearing down old neighborhoods to build another in the new style.
So we’re going to need more efficient automobiles, better ways to handle traffic congestion, and whatever other problems might be associated with sprawl. You’re not going to be able to force millions of suburbanites into the city so this is a problem that’s going to be with us for a while.
Odesio
I think the beauty of it is that we don’t have to tear down the old neighborhoods. I put a new roof on my house 5 years ago and I plan on replacing it with a solar roof when it wears out. I’m also looking at recycling my exterior and replacing it with concrete panels.
Sewer plants can be upgraded as we did in my area. We combined 3 community systems that were worn out into a single new system that is more efficient. As far as mcmansions go, it won’t matter if you apply technology to them. There is no reason why houses can’t eventually become independent systems with little or no footprint. With a house, you can pull water directly from the ground, use it for geothermal heating/cooling and return waste in individual septic systems. There are already many suburban communities that have no water/sewer connections.
We’re already building luxury electric cars that get the equivalent of 150 mpg. It’s just a function of time before the technology trickles down as it always does.
I didn’t say anything like that. I said that suburbs ARE more efficient, and this can be seen directly by comparing the cost of living in a large city compared to the cost of living in the suburbs.
Coincidentally, my office is moving this week out of a high-rise in the downtown area of the city, into an office right in the middle of a suburban residential neighborhood (one of those small commercial developments in the middle of a suburb). Why? because it’s WAY too expensive to stay in the downtown area. Rent is $40/sq ft, and our new office rent is a third of that.
The disconnect we have here is that you are trying to use energy efficiency as the only measure of efficiency, whereas I’m looking at ALL the costs. As I said before, energy is money, money is energy. You can’t separate them. With enough money, you can extract all the clean energy you need from various sources. So you simply can’t ignore economic efficiency.
You’ll get no argument from me that an apartment building is going to be more energy-efficient per person than the equivalent housing capacity in single family homes. What you’re missing is that energy efficiency is actually only a tiny part of the cost of living in a city. As I pointed out in my last message, the average family only spends a couple of thousand dollars a year on energy, whereas the differential between living in the city vs living in the suburbs can run in the tens of thousands of dollars. And even that isn’t a full measure of the difference, because the equivalent housing in the city won’t include a yard, a garage, or a quiet street for kids to play. There are quality of life issues that attract people to the suburbs, but even if the quality of life were the same, people would still flock to the suburbs for the simple reason that in the suburbs, their money goes further.
So why is that? If cities are so much more efficient than the 'burbs, why doesn’t that translate into lower costs? It’s not just housing that costs more - food costs more, transportation costs more, education costs more. Almost everything costs more in the city. How come?
A big part of the answer is the cost of real-estate. And that flows down into the cost of everything else. Groceries cost more because grocery stores in the city have to pay their workers more, and they have to pay more for their storage and retail space. Education costs more, because teachers have to be paid more to afford to live in the city. Economies of scale are lost, because stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot can’t afford to locate in the heart of the city. When people are reliant on foot travel or mass transit, locations close to transportation hubs and within walking distance of large apartments can charge a premium for their products (but that is absorbed in higher rent). And so it goes.
The closer you pack people together, the more expensive the real estate becomes. And when you close up the relief valve of urban sprawl through anti-sprawl zoning measures, or your city is limited in ability to grow by geography, eventually real estate prices go insane. Packing more people into such a region is simply NOT efficient - it’s hellishly expensive.
The data clearly shows that the more densely populated a city is, the less energy per capita it will consume, all else being equal. But the effect isn’t as strong as some other factors. For example, Chicago has fewer people per square mile than does Houston, yet Houston uses twice as much energy per capita. The reason should be obvious - air conditioning. Chicago’s climate is tempered by the Great Lakes, which makes it more energy efficient.
But again, it comes down to cost. At the end of the day, money matters. A suburb powered entirely by wind and solar power would still be cheaper to live in than New York City powered by coal, because the cost of energy is dwarfed by the extremely high cost of jamming people together like sardines.
I think your problem is that you spend so much time and effort thinking about energy and the environment, that you’ve lost a grasp on just how much we actually pay for it and what the value of energy efficiency really is. You need to get a sense of proportion.
Let’s take our carbon footprint as an example. If you think the problem with the suburbs is that they are being subsidized because they aren’t paying for their carbon, let’s see if we can figure out what that subsidy is worth. According to this cite, New Yorkers put out about 11 tons of carbon per year per person. New Jersey puts out 15 tons of CO2 per person - a difference of four tons. The amount of carbon is about 27% of that, or about 1.08 tons of carbon.
How much is a ton of carbon worth? Peer-reviewed estimates of the externality price of carbon have a pretty wide range - from $10/ton to $350/ton. Let’s be generous and use a little better than the median estimate, or $200/ton.
So the externality cost of living in Jersey is somewhere around $200 per year. The added energy cost for the commute and living in a home instead of an apartment might be an additional $1000/yr. But the cost of living in New York is 40% higher. The trade-off isn’t even close.
So focusing on energy efficiency as the sole measure of judging suburban vs urban living is ridiculous. If you priced carbon at a level high enough to pay for the externality cost, you’ll shave a little population off the suburbs and pull them back into the city - those people on the margin whose decisions were nudged over the line by the relatively small increase in the cost of living in the burbs. This might change the mix by a percent or two, but everyone else is staying right where they are. And for good reason.
If you’re going to count yards and garages as “quality of life” bonuses for the suburbs, you need to count things like theaters, stores within walking distance, festivals, museums, etc., as “quality of life” bonuses for the cities.
Aside from that, your economic comparison leaves out many ways in which suburban development is artificially cheap because it’s subsidized. For one thing, accelerated depreciation gives developers more incentive to put up new buildings in outlying areas than to renovate existing buildings. For another, when utility companies charge all customers the same cost for services, even though it costs them ten times as much to provide service to the outlying areas, the urban dwellers are subsidizing the sprawl dwellers. Private automobiles are a heavily subsidized form of transportation, which makes automobile-dependent localities less expensive to live in.
In short, to some extent, living in a suburb is cheaper because your neighbors in the city are helping you pay for it.
having a back yard where kids can play and adults can relax is not a quality of life bonus in a suburb. It is the default standard. And unless you have a museum on every corner you are at the mercy of taxis, buses or the ever fragrant subways to get you there. Waiting on these luxury chariots in the rain and snow is not something I would punch up on the bonus side of the scoreboard.
You’re going to have to cite that it’s cheaper for utility companies to run wire into a city than it is a suburb. Cities have to burrow underground at great expense to feed utility services and that’s after bringing the power in from outlying areas. And if an apartment has separate electric service for each tenant that means the building is double wired with individual breaker boxes instead of routing wire in the most direct pathway as houses are done. If it’s not, then you are subsidizing your neighbor’s electricity if they have more people in their apartment.
That underground utility system means a blackout is harder to deal with. The last NYC blackout in 2006 took 5 days to fix because they had to go manhole to manhole to find the problem. Add to that the serious nature of losing power in an apartment during a summer heatwave.
I think you misunderstood me. I was merely pointing out that Sam Stone was treating yards and garages as a lifestyle advantage in the suburbs’ favor. (Yes, I’m aware that having a yard and garage is the norm for suburban living.) By that logic, we should also count the lifestyle advantages of the cities, such as easy access to a large variety of special cultural/commercial attractions like museums, as a bonus in the cities’ favor. That doesn’t change just because you personally find public transit distasteful.
(By the way, I think most city dwellers are capable of walking farther than the nearest corner to get to a museum. And even museums that aren’t within walking distance are usually quicker and cheaper for city dwellers to get to than they are for sprawl dwellers who have to drive a half-hour or more to reach the museum, and then find parking.)
Who said it was? What I noted is that once a suburb begins to be developed (at which point, the city is already established and supplied with utilities: if the city weren’t there, it wouldn’t be spawning a suburb), it’s more costly for utility companies to provide services to its residents than to city dwellers, because they’re more spread out. Here’s a cite:
You can’t just compare the costs of establishing a city in the first place with the costs of establishing a suburb, as though they were both starting from scratch. The suburb’s existence is dependent on the prior existence of the city; that’s part of the definition of what a suburb is.