cite?
Depends who they are and what they like to do. Your chronic error here is that you persist in assuming that what you prefer applies equally to everybody else, so you refuse to consider anything a “lifestyle advantage” unless it happens to be something you like.
Yes, I get it that you think that having to drive everywhere is a minor inconvenience while having to walk in bad weather, or having to take public transit, is a major inconvenience. You don’t mind not having a lot of restaurants within walking distance because you don’t like to eat out that often anyway. You feel that seeing your own grass and flowers from the window of your home is more pleasant than seeing a cityscape or dramatic architecture. I totally understand that. Now, can you manage to wrap your head around the idea that some people feel differently from you?
If you mean that actual towns—standalone municipalities not in a metropolitan area—are cheaper to live in than metropolitan areas, the only response is “Well, duh”. Rural areas are cheaper to live in than metropolitan areas, too. The ultimate reason they’re cheaper is that fewer people want to live there.
But standalone municipalities separate from larger metropolitan areas are not what this thread’s about. It’s about “(sub)urban sprawl”: namely, once you’ve got an established city, what’s the best/most efficient way to accomodate growth of population in and around that city?
Stop trying to change the subject to the question of whether cities or other types of communities would be better if the city weren’t already there. The city is already there: that’s the whole premise of the “sprawl” concept.
I’m not mswas, but it’s easy to find cites supporting the claim that New York City is a net contributor to New York state revenues while the upstate region is a net recipient of them. Here’s one, for example.
However, I disagree with mswas that the downstate/upstate revenue situation in New York meaningfully illustrates a general claim about cities subsidizing suburbs. Yes, more dense communities definitely do subsidize less dense communities on things like uniformly priced utilities where the infrastructure costs per consumer are higher for the less dense community, as I pointed out above. But not every city-suburb interaction follows that model. I think that the evidence indicates that sprawl development is on average artificially underpriced because of subsidies, partly from neighboring cities and partly from state and federal government incentives. But I don’t agree that the downstate/upstate situation in New York is necessarily an argument for cities in general being net contributors to tax revenue.
You did notice that I said FOR ME, right? Of course many people like living in the city more than living in the suburbs or the country. There was a time when I did as well. If you’re young, you don’t have children, and you have an active social life with many friends, the city can be a wonderful place to be. More power to you if you enjoy that. I was simply responding to earlier arguments trying to claim that city life was objectively better. It’s not. Everyone has preferences and needs. For some, the city fulfills them, and for other, the suburbs do. I know people who are only happy living on a farm, and even small towns give them the willies.
I’m not the one here claiming that one type of lifestyle is intrinsically superior to another - that would be you.
As for the sniggering about my assuming that ‘theater’ means movies… Please. Just how many live theaters are within walking distance of most city dwellers? What percentage of the population attends live theater in any given year? For the vast majority of city dwellers, access to live theater and museums is completely irrelevant. You’re letting your own biases show.
When I lived downtown, the only things within walking distance for me were bars, magazine stores, a few restaurants, a couple of trendy clothing stores, and liquor stores. Oh, there was a Safeway about four blocks away, but I drove there anyway since I couldn’t carry all my groceries back to my apartment.
And you keep ignoring all other arguments about efficiency, focusing only on energy efficiency. Is it your argument that energy efficiency trumps all other concerns? That this is the only issue we should consider when evaluating the relative merits of suburban vs urban living?
In any event, your attempt to continue isolating energy efficiency from all other forms of economic efficiency strike me as being a way to avoid an argument you can’t win. I’ve already conceded that dense cities tend to consume less energy per capita. I am not arguing that. What I am arguing is that this one isolated form of efficiency is trivial compared to the huge inefficiencies that high density living brings, and that if your only goal is to lower our carbon footprint and make our lifestyles cleaner and more sustainable, you can take a fraction of the money you save living in the suburbs and subsidize clean energy and achieve the same thing with plenty of money left over.
Your argument is akin to saying that you should spend $20,000 per year more to rent a home close to Wal-Mart, because if you do, you’ll save $100/mo in clothing and grocery costs. The math just doesn’t add up. Again, the average American spends less than $2000/yr on energy. If city living allows you to consume only half that amount of energy, you’re only saving $1000/yr. Compared to the higher overall cost of living in major cities, this would be a silly trade-off if your only concern was to minimize your monthly expenses. And even if we fully taxed the externality cost of carbon, it would only add another few hundred dollars to your energy bill. You’d still be better off in the burbs, financially speaking.
Now, some jobs require city living. Some people like living in the city. For those people, the additional costs are just part of the price you pay to live your life the way you want. But there ARE additional costs. Living in the city is less efficient overall, and you pay for the privilege of being located in a dense pocket of humanity. Again, that’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not an argument against ‘sprawl’.
Frankly, I think ‘sprawl’ gets attacked because cities tend to be liberal, and politically active liberals tend to be young and like city life, and the center of editorial power is in the cities, and opinion leaders tend to be wealthier than average and are more likely to live in the city, and so a consensus has developed among this group that there is something inherently superior to city living, and that society would be better off if city living was encouraged and suburban living discouraged. Your side of this debate is the one which wants to push around others, to make them adhere to your idea of proper, responsible living. At the very least, you think suburbanites should feel guilty for their choices and pay extra taxes to cover the supposed subsidy of their lifestyle.
You keep repeating that, but you still haven’t provided any evidence for it beyond comparing the cost of living in the city and the suburbs. However, as I noted above, this argument is worthless if the city is partially subsidizing the suburbs.
You’re basing your arguments on ignoring the fact that suburbs depend on cities for their very existence. That’s what suburbs are. If you want to argue that the low-density suburb-type development is intrinsically more efficient overall than the high-density city, you need to show me a city-sized population that is not a satellite of a high-density city, but is low-density throughout. Then we can compare their overall efficiencies.
Insinuating that such subsidies are only “supposed” is not a valid refutation. As I said, I’m perfectly fine with people living in suburbs if they want to, but I want them to be honest about the costs they’re externalizing onto their neighbors.
It’s not a life style advantage if you can’t afford it.
OK, the love of architecture. There you go. You found something.
comparing suburban sprawl to nonconnected housing is directly relevant to the discussion. The most efficient use of land is out, not up. You can only make a building so efficient and then the process stops. Single family housing can be made virtually independent of all utility connections.
The solution to city sprawl is to tear down large buildings and build smaller scale developments. In other words, downsize. Move the people to resource stable areas instead of dragging the resources from afar. look at Chicago. They’re tearing down 40 large houseing projects.
Well that’s a cite with some meat on it. I downloaded it for further review. They used some interesting methods of breaking out the source of tax (location of business versus location of residence).
Reality check time. The city of Chicago has about 12,750 people per square mile, with a total population of about 2,896,000. Are you seriously claiming that reducing that population density to suburban levels throughout would make the city more efficient overall?
I’m not suggesting anything, I’m pointing out that Chicago is DOING it.
This is true. When you take into account all of an individuals needs - space, access to services, proximity to work, etc, you end up with a lot of people maximizing their benefits by living in suburban sprawl. I think the whole point though is that lifestyle is only sustainable because energy is so cheap. It makes sense to use more energy because your energy costs will not increase as fast as your living costs decrease as you move away from the city center. If energy costs suddenly rose, then it wouldn’t be as economical to live so far away from work or other amenities.
Sam Stone I think you are going about this all wrong. This thread is about how to solve sprawl. You come up with a lot of good arguments about how to solve the problems related to sprawl. Only you are presenting them within the framework of ‘urban’ vs ‘suburban’ which isn’t what’s at stake here. The original question was how to solve these inefficiencies related to sprawl. Make homes more energy efficient is certainly one way. A lot of people are going to start making a ton of money doing that. My friend is working on a business plan for that kind of business down in Mississippi, where he’ll make energy efficient homes and such. That’s part of why such grants were passed in the stimulus package, so that extra money could be spent on those kinds of projects.
I already addressed this, with cites to the amount of energy individuals actually consume. As a percentage of living costs, it’s actually rather small. $1000 per year for household energy use is about the average. That’s probably not even as much as what the average person pays for phone, TV, and Internet. Hell, if you’ve got an iPhone, you’re paying almost as much for that per year as you pay for your energy.
Residential energy consumption only makes up about 21% of the total energy used in the United States. Of that 21%, about half is affected by the size of your living space (heating, air conditioning). The rest is used for things like powering electronics, and running major appliances. So we’re talking about being able to affect maybe 10% of energy in the United States, and of that, if everyone moved to cities we might be able to cut that usage in half. So, the max gain we could get is 5%, at the cost of hundreds of trillions of dollars and the destruction of the chosen lifestyle for a large percentage of the country.
I also broke out the figures for the ‘subsidy’, measured in terms of carbon, and that only turns out to be a couple of hundred dollars a year.
As for these other nebulous subsidies of the suburbs by the cities, I remain unconvinced - mainly because some of them seem like a stretch, and because they only consider the transfer in one direction. You could just as easily say that suburban dwellers are subsidizing city dwellers, because if they all moved into the city rents would skyrocket. But none of these things are real subsidies.
The fact is that cities have many advantages, and so do the suburbs. Where you choose to live is going to depend on your own needs and how well they mesh with urban or suburban living. I’ve been saying that cities are inefficient, but that’s not really correct - there are many jobs and activities which make total sense to have in a city. And many which don’t.
Here’s the way an economist would look at it - he would look at the way society has organized itself today, and accept that as evidence of a rational, efficient distribution. At the macro level, these things generally are. Now, that economist might start looking for hidden subsidies and externalities which bias results in one direction or another, but he’ll find zillions of them. Tax breaks for city living. Subsidized mass transit in the city. Subsidized roads in the suburbs. Tax breaks for stadiums and museums in the city. Intra-governmental transfers of wealth from one region to another. Social programs which disproportionately benefit the inner city. Farm subsidies and other rural/suburban subsidies. It’s not a simple matter to determine who’s getting the bigger free ride. But suffice it to say that compared to the aggregate value of real estate in the city and in the suburbs, and the large cost of living differences between regions, all of these implied or real subsidies might amount to changes on the margins if they all vanished tomorrow, but probably wouldn’t fundamentally restructure the way people choose to live.
The allure of cheap real estate is simply the elephant in the room. For the price of a two-bedroom apartment in the city, I have a 3000 sq ft. home with a large yard, a garage with a shop, a nice view, no worries about noise from the neighbors, a rec room with a pool table, etc. This advantage is so tremendous for me that it would take a massive tax to get me to move into the city. I’d probably leave the country and find a similar living space elsewhere before I’d allow my family to be chivvied into a city apartment. Most suburban dwellers feel the same way. This is the life we’ve chosen, and we value it highly. And it IS perfectly sustainable. Given the amount of energy we use and the cost of it compared to our incomes, even if energy quadrupled in price almost all of us would stay right where we are. And you could power everything with clean energy if you’re willing to pay four times the price.
This completely ignores the issue of energy use for transportation, which is around 29% of total US energy consumption. Sprawl dwellers use significantly more energy for transportation per capita than city dwellers.
Nonsense. When city dwellers pay more for uniformly-priced utilities because it costs more to provide utility service to sparsely populated areas, that’s a subsidy for sprawl. When more federal transportation funding goes to roads in low-density suburbs than to mass transit in high-density cities, that’s a subsidy for sprawl. When tax policy provides incentives for building new homes rather than renovating existing ones, or for home ownership rather than renting, that’s a subsidy for sprawl. There’s nothing “nebulous” or “not real” about these examples.
On this, we can agree.
He’d have to be a pretty naive economist, then, and surprisingly unfamiliar with basic concepts like market distortions. Yes, there are plenty of specific efficiencies resulting from social self-organization, but to blithely assume that the status quo as a whole is automatically rational and efficient is just begging the question.
You, of course, aren’t in the United States, so your personal situation isn’t directly relevant to the US-based stats we’ve been working with in this thread. However, assuming that you’re just using own your situation as a proxy for US suburbanites, I think it’s great that you find suburban living so affordable. In that case, you have nothing to bitch about if you’re asked to pay, say, geographic-differential surcharges on utility prices, or a carbon tax to internalize the costs of your extra energy use.
I don’t want to stop people living in the suburbs if they like it. I just want our economy and society to stop bribing people to live in the suburbs by making suburban living artificially cheap.
Nice of you to omit the next paragraph after that, where I said that after starting from that position, he’d then look for market distortions to determine how much of an effect they had.
I remain unconvinced that on the whole, the suburbs are subsidized by cities. Have you considered things like property tax which may be disproportionately distributed to city dwellers? The lower cost of law enforcement for the suburbs? The social value of maintaing populations in regions of low crime and high quality education? The lowered risk from pandemics or terrorist attacks? The high social cost of inner-city decay to the whole country? The lower cost of real-estate, which makes low-cost goods and services available to city dwellers? The value of the additional green space, parks, and recreational facilities that are built in the suburbs but shared by city dwellers? The benefit the city gets from having some citizens opt to trade off long commutes for better living conditions, which eases population pressure on city real estate pricing?
You have to realize that the suburbs are changing. They aren’t just tracts of McMansions and row houses any more. Increasingly, businesses are locating in the suburbs and big box retailers and mini-malls are making the suburbs somewhat self-contained. Many people in the suburbs now work and shop within a few miles of their homes. I happen to see this as a positive trend. I can remember when the morning rush hour traffic flow all went one direction - people flooding into the city. Then at quitting time, all the traffic went the other way.
Around here, that’s no so much the case any more. Traffic moves in all directions. The bulk still heads into the city but a very significant minority of the traffic is moving around in the suburbs and not going anywhere near the city. I think this trend will continue, because advances in technology and the changing nature of employment, coupled with our much better communication networks, has reduced the economic and social need to be located in the city.
Let me give you an example. Our company just moved, and some of us just had our commute times doubled. The company’s response is to allow us to work from home an extra day a week. Maybe two. That means my road and gas consumption will only go up slightly. That means travel distances have even less effect than they used to. That works to the benefit of the suburbs.
Yeah, that was a perfectly reasonable remark; what I couldn’t figure out was why you sabotaged it right from the get-go with the gratuitous assumption that the status quo counts as “evidence” that the existing organization is “rational and efficient” just because it’s the status quo. Why wouldn’t a sensible economist just start out looking for efficiencies and inefficiencies, without saddling himself with an initial market-fundamentalist bias by assuming that what we’ve already got is efficient by definition?
Notice that I never said that. I said that there are specific ways in which suburbs are subsidized by cities, and specific ways in which suburbs are subsidized from other sources such as federal tax policy. I agree, and have been agreeing all along, that the question of who is the net donor and who is the net recipient in any particular city/suburb interaction is a tricky one, and cannot be determined by appeal to general trends. Nonetheless, it’s fairly easy to identify some very specific ways (and those that I named are only a few of them) in which the cost of suburban living is artificially lowered by subsidies that externalize part of its actual costs.
Wow, what novel concepts! Local employment/residential/shopping hubs where workplaces and residences are close to each other! Workplace policies that deprioritize driving! You really need a name for exciting innovations like these! I know: why not call it “Smart Growth”?
Seriously, dude, I don’t think anyone’s about to argue with you that if you can manage to nurture lower-density communities that don’t in fact exhibit the disadvantages associated with sprawl, then the problem is fixed. Mind you, I think you are probably a bit overoptimistic about the extent to which those disadvantages really are, or will be, eliminated in low-density areas. (I think that the impact of transportation in less dense areas is going to remain more significant than you paint it, for one thing, and telecommuting and shopping locally will do nothing to eliminate concerns about pressures on wildlife habitat, for another.) Nonetheless, I’m delighted to see people at least trying.
It’s a matter of weighting - do you look at the economy with the starting assumption that the choices people make are in the aggregate irrational and distorted until proven otherwise? Or with the starting assumption that their choices in the aggregate are rational and efficient until proven otherwise? Most economists are in the latter camp - the structure of society in a free market is a reflection of the rational choices people have made, and in aggregate they lead to efficient outcomes. From that starting point, you can then consider the effects of various distortions on the market.
Interventionists tend to believe that the revealed choices of society through the market are more the result of monopoly, ignorance, the use of force by the rich or special interests, and do not reflect optimal outcomes. Therefore, they are open to government interventions to correct the ‘flaws’ that are inherent in the market.
Classical liberals believe that structure of society truly reflects the optimal or best compromise path resulting from the millions of trade-offs brokered every day between people of conflicting desires, but who are essentially rational in their choices. The burden of proof therefore falls on those who wish to use the government to intervene. They must convincingly make the case that the market has failed before intervention should be even considered.
Then we don’t really disagree. But the whole premise of this thread is that ‘urban sprawl’ is something that needs to be ‘dealt with’. So it appears that your opinion and mine are in opposition to the opinion of the OP.
And it’s equally easy to show the opposite. So what? Isolating a specific instance of externality or subsidy is irrelevant until you can prove the case that there is a net outflow in one direction or the other. Something no one has proven in this debate.
I prefer to call it “the natural tendency of the market to solve problems, and for spontaneous order to fill the gaps where needs arise”. No central bureaucrat engaged in ‘smart planning’ here. This was not a top-down scientific planning exercise. The migration of businesses to the suburbs is the result of market forces. It’s actually in opposition to many of the attempts to centrally plan the structure of cities.
Actually, you may be surprised to find that I would advocate some transportation reforms to correct certain existing problems. They aren’t market failures, because they are problems created by government.
For example, sprawl and traffic congestion are partly the result of the nature of road construction and funding - roads are paid for by taxes, and not by how much they are used. Once a road is in place, there is no penalty for using it as much as you want. This means that the use of roads is generally limited by congestion - absent prices, people will consume the resource until it becomes too painful to consume it any more. Cities therefore have a tendency to sprawl out until the roads themselves become choke points.
A much smarter way to manage roads is to institute per-use charges and congestion pricing. We need more market forces. In the past, this was almost impossible to do. Today, it’s trivial. GPS, roadside cameras, and other technologies make it possible to implement congestion pricing in a way that’s transparent and hassle-free. There are ways to address privacy concerns as well.
This one change would radically alter the way people use their cars. It would give added incentive to businesses to locate close to the workers, or for workers to locate close to their places of employment. It would give incentives for flex hours, telecommuting, or off-peak business hours that lower the cost of commuting and increase energy efficiency. This could be made revenue neutral by lowering suburban property taxes in direct proportion to the amount of money collected through suburban traffic on arterial roads.
Correct the externalities, then let people make their own choices. Forget about ‘scientifically planning’ the structure of communities. Emergent order is a better way to go, so long as you eliminate the distortions and barriers to efficient transactions.
I disagree, state roads should reflect traffic flow and the taxes from fuel should cover this. A lot of our problems are the result of poor planning. If you go back 100 years we built structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge to flow traffic way in excess of the traffic of the day and it was built to last. When they built the interstate highway system through my area it was a poor design from day one. Even as a kid I thought it was a disaster waiting to happen. They built 3 major interchanges that are landlocked by design. No thought was put into expansion. On top of that they built a 45 mph bottleneck curve in a highway designed to flow traffic at 70 mph. It’s costing a small fortune to fix it.
If you want to look at it from a government planning standpoint then trends need to be identified and acted upon. It wasn’t hard to see trucks replacing trains as a method of moving freight. Time is money in the freight business. Since trains are 3 times as efficient as trucks it seems to me we should nudge the marriage of truck and train in a direction that the market would find pleasing. I find it diffucult to believe we can’t set up a system that allows a trailer to board a train (like a passenger) and ride to a destination in a timely manner. We move trailers on trains now so it’s not a stretch to tweak this into something more mainstream.
I’ve been in the logistical and route analys side of the freight industry for 26 years. Intermodal is not time competive with interstate trucking.
The problem with road funding from taxes is that once you’ve paid the tax, it doesn’t matter which road you drive on, or when. Choosing to drive on a road that is 95 % congested costs you no more than to drive on one that is empty. Or rather, you only incur additional costs once the road becomes congested enough to slow you down. That means the demand-limiting factor on roads is congestion itself, and this makes road use inefficient.
Now, if I could log in to my computer at home and see that a drive to work will cost me $2.50 for road use at 8 AM, but if I go at 9 AM it will only be $1.00, then I have some incentive to plan my trips such that I avoid the more in-demand times. This would spread traffic out more, making the road system more efficient and conserving energy because less fuel would be burned due to traffic delays.
Companies would find additional incentive to offer more flexible hours. If two companies are competing for the same person at the same salary, but one company demands the employee be at work at 8 AM, which costs the employee an additional $50/mo in congestion fees, and the other allows the imployee to start at 9 AM, saving $30/mo, the second company has an advantage.
And when you’re shopping for a home, you’re going to pay more attention to the road system and the value of locating somewhere either closer to work, or where the road system is under-utilized.
Road allocation is inefficient today because congestion creates an externality that is not paid for. If I decide to drive on a congested road, I slow everyone else down. But I don’t pay for that. Congestion pricing eliminates the externality, and allows the market to work. Once the market is working, the city over time will organize itself more efficiently. It might reduce the size of the suburbs, or it might cause businesses to move out of congested areas, or it might cause additional road construction to capture the additional tax revenue that the demand for certain routes creates.