Well, NOW some of them are, due to the foreclosure rates, which has little bearing on whether or not people WANT to live in the middle of a city, or if there’s actually any benefit in doing so outside of a few outliers like New York and Chicago.
Are you ignoring the list of over a dozen cities I mentioned that had a high amount of growth? Explosive in most cases.
Nothing to fix. The market is taking care of things just fine. The cities are trying to collect “rent” for access to their market (the residents) and are setting the price very high. The residents want free stuff, and vote in politicians who promise them free stuff. They get fewer businesses locating there over time, and some residents vote with their feet, because they want to be able to buy groceries, hardware, toys etc at prices and hours that are not available in the city. The population tends towards people who want “free stuff” and the people who pay for the free stuff keep fleeing. The tax rates, explicit and implicit on businesses keep rising.
Unless you have some unique economic draw (and many cities have this) you start spiralling down.
It is a picture of Jersey City, probably taken from near Hoboken, both of which are technically satellite citiesof New York.
A good example of urban sprawl is Phoenix, Az. The reason they can build like that is they have all the land in the world out there in the Arizona desert. However, I imagine living like that must use huge amounts of every other resource - water, gas, etc.
I am not sure if you are missing my point, but I am pretty sure Odesio is. My point was regarding sprawl and the definition of suburb that uses sprawl within its context that many of the posters here have taken for granted. When Sam Stone and ITR Champion are speaking of suburb I think they are talking about the standard quarter acre plot with a backyard and such. Both New York’s Satellites and Phoenix Arizona throw that definition into turmoil. Basically we need to define precisely what we are talking about when we say, ‘suburb’, and ‘sprawl’, as was shown with my cite of the census data that wasn’t exactly clear as to how it defined ‘urban’. Phoenix Arizona itself is like a sprawling suburb whereas Jersey City would be a bustling metropolis in any other state.
And Phoenix and Arizonia in general in terms of building is rife with corruption, mismanagement, building on soft sands, building over the limit of what the local Aquifers can support. Much of Phoenix’s new construction has cracked foundations from building on the soft sands. The idea that the Phoenix metroplex has all the land in the world to expand is a bit of a misnomer, there are geographic concerns that are not visible to the naked eye that make expansion there a bad idea. It also has been one of the worst hit subprime areas with whole housing divisions that are unrecoverable and will have to be torn down. My wife’s Mother is an urban Geographer, retired from ASU.
I don’t think people are so much missing the point, but that you made a potentially valuable point very obscurely. I don’t think anyone understood what you were getting at at all.
Secondly, while we are seeing a resurgence in urban living, this is in large part because of urban depopulation. In many areas, including smaller cities, people moving out of the downtown finally dropped prices low enough to attract people, mostly young people and the elderly, back in. Downtowns can now offer more reasonable prices on reasonable space - whereas before the big issue was that most people simply couldn’t afford anything worth having in cities. But it is extremely misleading to view this as a mass exodus away from suburbs in favor of cramming everyone into high-density apartment blocks.
Anyway, sprawl is not a problem. Cities can only grow so much before they are not longer really cities at all. That’s just a basic, practical issue, and not even a “problem”. Likewise, while some poeple like urban excitments, others want space and open areas. Just as 19th-century leftists decried the move from the virtuous countryside to the immoral city, so do modern leftists decry the move from the virtuous city to the immoral surburb, and for many of the same reasons.
I think we are trying to make the same point - that what people are really talking about is “sprawl”, not necessarily “suburb”. Basically low-density automobile-centric cities that are laid out in massive blocks of suburban tract housing developments, generic office parks, chain restaurants, strip malls, big box stores and megamalls surrounded by square miles of parking lot.
I fail to see a difference.
Where do you know of that downtown prices are dropping? I have not heard of such a thing, in all the cities I am aware of downtown prices rose astronomically before the bust and fell much less than suburban prices. Well then maybe both the suburbs and the city are growing at the expense of the rural. Also there are some cities being depopulated at a fantastic clip, people are moving out of the rust belt and the midwest quite rapidly.
Well even suburbs could be created to have walking spaces, the fact that they are not is the real problem with sprawl. The lack of town centers creates a discontinuity in the community, and contributes to a greater traffic load on our infrastructure, and is part of the reason why we don’t have good mass transit. The cult of the car is an unhealthy obsession that infected urban planning through the 20th century. Sprawl IS most certainly a problem, but suburbs need not be synonymous with sprawl in the way it’s being looked at in this thread.
Lack of community ties, obesity, pollution, all of these things come from being locked in our cars rather than out in the open air walking.
Right, those are poor models for building a city around in general. I for one have no desire to live in an area like that ever again. I don’t know what is to be done, the towns already exist in that format, and there are people who prefer that, so I don’t know what there is to do.
You are correct. “Sprawl” isn’t the problem. We need to examine the problems caused by sprawl:
-traffic congestion
-inefficient use of resources
-health concerns (ie never using your legs)
-land mismanagement
-lack of any sense of community or “place”
There is likely a solution somewhere between paving over the planet and building giant arcology hives for people to live in Blade Runner style.
Hey! What’s wrong with giant arcology hives?
One of the problems with sprawl is that it is no longer enough to have the quarter acre plot of land with a house. To have it “made” around here, you have to have 5-10 acres of land around your McMansion, all of which is grass, mowed to 3" tall and fertilized and treated to within an inch of its life. This results in low-density housing that is spread out (think long commutes) and environmentally unsustainable. There’s a big difference, ecologically, between a field that is allowed to lay fallow or remain wooded, providing habitat for a large variety of insects/plants/animals, and a huge lawn which is practically sterilized and produces nitrogen-heavy runoff from fertilizers every time it rains. I’m seeing more and more of the latter around here, and I think the problem is not just sprawl but resulting homogenization of the landscape – it certainly is possible to have houses on 5-10 acre lots while still preserving habitat diversity.
On green space – Colibri could probably shed more light on this, but, as I understand it, migratory birds need safe, wooded places to stop over, so it’s not good to have large areas which are devoid of prime habitat.
Har Har. Arrogant arsehole.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a home on 5-10 acres that is entirely lawn.
They cost a fortune 
Also, I find those large luxury towers somewhat isolating. You have great views of the city…from 200 ft above it. They lack that neigborhood feel that you get from smaller buildings. Then again, you don’t get the consumate Manhattan view of your neighbors brick wall.
**horsetech **- I have to agree with mswas. Where are you that people have 5-10 acre lawns? That sound more like some sort of rural bedroom community, not urban sprawl.
Very well, here is the difference: you communicated so poorly that your meaning was totally unclear.
I have, although it’s the only one in town I’ve seen, and it’s owned by a successsful car dealership owner, and the house is in mediocre bad tase anyway. He put his actual, straight-up mansion (not McMansion at all: the real thing) basically out in a very public location. He demolished a handsome wooded lot and keeps the entire huge, huge lawn trimmed perfectly so everyone can see his house.
I was not impressed. The house itself isn’t bad, but he made a sort of spectacle about it. There are others with spaces like that, but those are semi-rural lots and things.
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I do not agree with this. People have the money and choose to spend it on housing. Their choice. It is only “inefficient” in that people live on more space. Which they are entitled to if they wish and have the resources. Which they do. They are not being wasteful at all.
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So convince them to go for walks. I don’t think it’s your place to be demanding others walk if they don’t wish.
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This goes back to (1.).
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Their choice. If you want community, go make it. People constantly moving, fearmongers making everyone terrified that their neighbors are all child molesters, helicopter parenting, and the internet itself have in my opinion a much greater impact on community life than suburbs. In fact, until relatively recently, suburbs were quite frequently centers of community life.
1./3. It’s not just land. It’s increased time and energy spent commuting. It’s increased energy spent pumping water, gas, sewage, electric and cable to or from their homes. It’s also increased energy costs from having to constantly drive between any two points.
While market forces and economics help determine where people live, it is also determined by planning and zoning. When they are out of sync, it leads to abandonment and urban decay.
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You can’t and shouldn’t force people to exercise. However, the way suburban communities are designed, you couldn’t walk anywhere if you wanted to. Except maybe the quarter mile across the Best Buy parking lot to get from your car to the store. What I’m getting at is paving great swaths of land surrounding islands of strip malls and box stores seems inherently wasteful to me and they look ugly as shit. Like some kind of asphalt desert.
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Modern suburban design, TV and the internet has created our culture of people constantly moving, helicopter parenting and fearmongers making everyone terrified that their neighbors are all child molesters. It isolates people from one another so that their only source of information and reality comes from the wildly skewed messages from the tv and internet.
Fair enough. 
I’ve always wanted to live in a High Rise apartment and still hope to one day. Maybe one day I’ll be bored of it, but I’ll reserve judgment until I know.
And even then I’ve never seen such a thing rurally, most people who have 5-10 acres have a pond or a grove and unkempt fields with a small patch of lawn on the quarter acre surrounding their house.
Yes, and it resulted in people not understanding what I was saying. See, we are saying the same thing. 
Eww, that’s gross. What a jackass. Doesn’t he know that houses like that are made prettier by having a grove of trees to accent it?
You’re making a mistake here. They might have every right to be wasteful, but it’s still wasteful. We have decided to allow people leeway in how they choose to spend their capital resources, and that’s fine, but just because it’s legally justifiable doesn’t change the ethical ramifications of it.
Who is demanding? We’re just pointing out.
It’s actually not so much of a choice as people think. Most people do not live their lives by choice, they live their lives based upon prescribed desires imparted to them by the values of their parents or the values of the television or their religion or whatever. People are generally not separated from a community by choice, they are separated because they don’t really have a connection to the community to begin with. The lack of walking has as much impact as anything else upon the disconnection from the community. There just are no two ways about it. We go from one air conditioned pod to another when we live in the suburbs with very little contact with others around us. The fact that people don’t really know their neighbors is a big deal. You need to separate the notion of ‘forcing’ people to conform to some sort of philosophical ideal, and the recognition of the philosophical ideal. No one is advocating forcing them to change their ways, we are just pointing out the negative impacts of zoning suburban style.
These are just complaints and don’t address the reason people want to live in suburbs. Nothing will change until you address their needs.