Brain Glutton: One question about the quote you have there, and the future it sees: what do you think will happen to places like Hawaii if and when long distance transportation becomes unfeasable? Hawaii, for one, depends on outside sources for not only a lot of staples, but its economy as well. What will happen when it becomes a speck in the middle of nowhere no one can get to easily?
Although I feel some trepidation in participating in this thread I’ve noticed some things repeated a few times that I myself thought was a given.
The days of the internal combustion gasoline engine are numbered.
Suburban Cities are unsustainable.
A few months ago I would have agreed with these statements as common sense based on current trends. Now I am not so sure. Technologies emerging such as a nearly developed Thermal Depolymerization plant might produce a situation where hydrocarbons in any form become a viable source of fuel. If the technology pans out and if it’s adopted everything from agricultural wastes, sewage, waste plastic and wood products ect. can be converted to fuel. This wouldn’t necessarily be an ecological nightmare either as long as the source of the hydrocarbons originate from biomass, the fuel produced and burned constitute a more or less closed carbon system. If you also take into account the fact that world population as a whole is projected to decline in the next century, with significant declines in most western industrialized nations you might have a situation where large suburbanized cities reliant on personal transportation become ‘sustainable’. I grant this is a possibility based on quite a few 'if’s but I myself no longer think the car and single family home with a yard are doomed in the future.
Well, no, actually. Unless you are very lucky or work in a low-paying, service-industry field (in which case you probably don’t own a home) the chances that you can find a job close to home are rather small, when you leave your job as most Americans do every so often.
It’s not just that there has to be a business nearby that needs the skills you have. There has to be a business nearby that has a vacancy in your line of work, and which pays something like what you used to get.
This can be very difficult to find. Even if we were all organized in smart communities, this problem would still exist, and it’s jobs that make for all those long commutes, not trips to the grocery store or to church (with some noticeable exceptions – travelling 23 miles one way to church is not the norm.)
Exacerbating all the problems mentioned is our surging population growth (in the USA). Another part of the dreamworld in which many of us live is that due to our history of tolerance and immigration, we can and must accommodate all who want to come here. It should be mentioned here that immigration is the primary driving factor behind population growth in the U.S.A., if one includes native born children of first generation immigrants. As commonly argued, the children of immigrants continue to do very well in comparison to their parents, and recent studies bear this out for recent immigrants just as it was true for European immigrants of decades past. Nobody sees any downside to this. Business welcomes the cheap labor and expanded markets (even though those two things are ultimately incompatible). The average consumer welcomes cheap domestic help, manufactured products, produce, and immigrant supported service enterprises such as restaurants). And the fact that children of poor immigrants make it out of the lower class is as good a demonstration of the American dream as you’ll find. But when you make it to the middle class in this country, it usually means you buy a house in the suburbs, and a car, and there you are added to the traffic, pollution, and fuel consumption that’s already there. And so it goes, as Vonnegut used to say, on and on and on.
Smart Growth is yet another idealistic theory that assumes that the planners are much smarter than the public.
It’s the old critique of the market – that the public persists in choosing what they want, rather than what the critics think they should want – in yet another new guise.
I think that’s a pretty good assumption. Planners actually have training and intelligence. The public, inasmuch as it can be said to “have” anything, just has an aggregate of desires. If I’m having a house built, I’ll be wanting a builder who designs based on what I need, not what I want. Maybe I want a house with one giant room and no walls. Hopefully the builder will explain that “sure, we can do that, but the first time it rains hard the roof is going to cave in and kill you.”
The same goes for cities. We need someone smart to think about it and say “sure, we can build sprawling cities, but the next time there’s an oil crisis the whole local economy will implode and our collective howl of pain will be heard the world over.”
I think various aspects of developing and buying “outlying” land needs to be made vastly more expensive in order to internalize the costs such development causes. (Already, it is clear my ignorance of economics will get me into trouble here, as I am unable to intelligently address the effect this would have on our overall economy.)
In the Chicago area, at present, moving to the outer edges of suburbia is one of the most inexpensive housing options. Of course, as has been noted above, for the homes to be built, the municipality/county needs to provide increased services - roads, schools, etc. Then, once folk move in, they are dependent on their cars for even the simplest errand.
I am not suggesting that people should be prohibited from building homes in the middle of cornfields. I merely suggest that they should bear a greater portion of the costs associated with their desires.
Some additional mechanisms I might favor would be a huge increase in gas taxes and/or major subsidies for public transportation and its users.
I’ve taken my AICP background into these discussions before, but I will give a very very cynical response now since it’s the end of the work day and being cynic is much easier than trying to explain things in a productive way. I’ll present some thoughts on the matter in a thought chunks:
Though Chunk #1:
The urban planning field is way to broad for its own good. What is a planner? Some folks look at transporation. Some folks look at land use. There’s also areas like economic planning, environmental planning, social planning, waste water planning, urban design, architectural planning (my particular specialty for the time being…), facilities planning, housing, urban design, general bureaucracy, politics, commissions, blah, blah, blah. The director of planning in a particular suburb of Chicago once told me (back when I was an intern) that a planner is a jack of all trades, master of none, though most of us tend to have masters degrees. Kinda’ funny, huh? Anyway, the point of this thought chunk is that planners are so all-over-the-place that any effort to be comprehensive, aand to incorporate any holistic notion of planning typically falls short of the mark, often significantly. Add to this problem that planning for “society” is like aiming at a moving target, as trends shift before we can catch up with them. So, basically, planning is very often an excerices in futility, though most functioning planners tend to fit into one of three categories: those who think they make a difference, those who know they don’t but like the job security and pension of working as a planner for a government, and those disgruntled planners who rant about planning until they finally get the guts to change careers. I’m thinking about joining the circus, myself. But in the mean time I’ll just wirte thought chunks and pretend I’m a retired entertainer.
Thought Chunk #2:
All this doesn’t really matter anyway since planners are very very very rarely empowered anyway. If a planner ever tries to use his or her influence for anything planning-related that might actually bring about change for the good (or bad), this planner is labelled unethical since planners should only really advise, not act. Acting is for hired officials who can do whatever they want within the law (or they can step outside the law as they so often do). But when a planner acts, it’s a conflict of interest. And planning decisions lay where the money is (which planners usually don’t have too much of, unless they’re transportation planners and have counted lots and lots of cars, or they have been unethical, which might mean that they are effective planners). Speaking of planning being where the money is…
Thought Chunk #3:
It’s funny how we think policy can influence who uses a car and uses public transporation and who live in suburbs… Law can influence these things, as in what public officials dictate with or without consent form planners (and public officials need to get reelected and also like campaign money). But why would any public official adopt any planning theory without persoanl gain? (Yeah, yeah, some public officials are true public servants and act only for the sake of the public without political interests. My mother happened to be the mayor of a suburb for eight years, and she had no interest in political power. She turned down an offer to run for state senate, and pushed away those who would wanted to make her the governor. Oh, and she was amused when she and was given an urban planning award for smart growth when she and her staff admittedly had no intention to do anything labelled as smart growth. They just wanted to do stuff that made sense for their suburb and some planners thought it was good smart growth. Given the term was still relatively new, since most were still into new urbanism, they had to actually look up what smart growth was to see what they had done! My mom even called me for my input.) This is a winding thought chunk. I guess it’s more like a thought smear, huh. Anyway, smart growth or not, if the public (with the money) doesn’t like the product, then it ain’t gonna’ sell and that’s capitalism and democracy at work. Plan all you want.
Thought Chunk # 4:
Smart growth, is just another trend of the times. What really is the difference between new urbanism and smart growth, anyway? This reminds me. I once saw Duany give a slide lecture about new urbanism, and he showed the difference between a modern suburb with a new urbanistic suburb. The only real difference I saw was that the new urbanistic suburb had houses with porches and bigger trees. Basically, the concept sold only in places where wealthy folks could buy neat little houses, never really finding the mix-use, non-gentrified, non-auto-dominated urban setting. Smart growth is probably going to replaced with some other hot planning movement sometime soon, as they are replaced, when someone else has a fancy new angle on how to appeal to our desire for the perfect place. Then we’ll have a new mission. But really, the goals never really change much. As Americans, we all want to have our stuff, and we don’t want feel responsible to destroying the environement or hurting others or making the world a worse place. It’s easier to save the world then to get along with your neighbor. And planners can be counted on for creating new ways to plan us a better world every five or six or seven years.
Thought Chunk #5:
I hope everyone truly believes that I’m Elvis Presley so that nobody can take away my AICP initials after reading this heresy. I worked hard for them and by golly I’m proud to have them! Smart Growth is dead! Long live Smart Growth!
A lot of what you people are saying just gives me the willies. It sounds like dressed up Ludditism. Suburbs aren’t sustainable? Says WHO?
Why don’t you just resist your impulses to control other people’s lives, and let people go where they want? Society is pretty much self-organizing. People live in suburbs because people like living in suburbs.
Now, I would heartily agree that we should minimize distortions in the marketplace due to subsidies, to make sure people pay the true cost of their choices. But isn’t that the case? You make the assumption that suburban automobile users are subsidized - I don’t know about you, but I pay a pretty hefty gasoline tax, and I pay hefty property taxes. If I’m still not paying my share, show me the numbers. I’m willing to pay my own way. I ask for no subsidies. In exchange, I’ll ask you to keep your hairy little mitts out of my business.
While the sentiment is correct, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than $2/gallon. Here in Canada, we’re already paying much more than that, and our urban sprawl is continuing at an increasing rate.
Leave society to its own devices, make sure prices reflect true cost (mainly by keeping the government OUT of market decisions), and people will make rational choices. That is a fundamental principle of economics. If gas goes to $2/gallon, you’ll start to see a market shift back towards smaller, more efficient vehicles. If it goes to $3/gallon, hybrids will become a very popular vehicle option. If it goes to $10/gallon, there will be an increased premium placed on telecommuting jobs. Cities will naturally (and slowly) reorganize themselves. Downtown cores will revitalize somewhat. Perhaps new arrangements will form, such as bedroom communities centered around an employer, or employer shuttles that pick up employees. Who knows? It’s unknowable, just as the rise of teenager independence due to the automobile was unknowable to Henry Ford. Perhaps some other structure will arise that we can’t even fathom today.
Do you have some numbers to support that? What costs am I not picking up? If I had to pay for them all, how much would it be?
And suburban living is only a big consumer of gasoline TODAY. As the price of gas rises, that will change.
Should single people pay taxes to support schools? Should young people pay taxes to support old people? Should rich people pay taxes to support poor people?
And again, please tell me how much tax money goes to supporting suburban dwellers. I want to see some numbers, please.
But hybrids can, and so can fuel cell vehicles. The average CAFE standard today is something like 22mpg. Just by switching to hybrid propulsion (something we KNOW we can do), we can double that.
That’s an extreme example. I live in a suburb in a 600,000 person city, and my commute (to the downtown core) is about 12 miles. I would guess that 90% of all the suburban residents in the city have commutes that are under 20 miles.
So let’s take that as an average. A 20 mile commute, in a vehicle that gets 20mpg. At $2/gallon, that’s $4/day in gasoline costs. $80 per month. I pay more than that for monthly parking in the downtown core. Gasoline is cheaper than insurance, maintenance, parking, and the vehicle itself.
No, I see suburban living as the result of the free choices of free people living in a free country. No laws force people into the suburbs. However much they spend on gas, or however long they spend in their vehicles, they have made personal choices to do that, rather than live in a crowded, crime-ridden city core in a small apartment. I have a nice home overlooking a lake. We have no crime. We have a dog. My daughter has a big yard to play in. I have a 2.5 car garage, with space for a workshop for my hobbies. We are surrounded by trees and lush lawns. We have a firepit out back, and a lovely patio with a barbecue. I am willing to pay for the gasoline and the commute time in order to have that.
If you want to live in the city, great. Just don’t try to get the government to put a gun to my head to make ME conform to what YOU think is right.
And the reason is perfectly natural: Because in other countries (especially Europe), the population is very congested, and cities are built on ancient infrastructures that were never meant to accomodate large quantities of vehicles.
So we’ve got it better than them in this regard. Why would you want to punish us because we happen to have a bounty of riches when it comes to living area? Why force us all to huddle together in urban communities just because Europe has to?
Why don’t you compare apples to apples, and see how much sprawl there is in other countries that have low population densities? Check out Canada, or Australia for example.
Change doesn’t happen overnight. We won’t wake up one morning and discover that disaster has befallen us. The way it will happen is that as gas prices rise, alternatives will develop. Alternative energy sources, alternative community structures, etc. As urban sprawl continues, the commute times will become increasingly onerous, and that will help limit the sprawl. Property values in the closer suburban areas will rise, and that will put pressure on developers to build more multi-family units. And so on. People are pretty smart, you know. They can look after themeselves. We don’t need busybodies telling us how to live.
Point 1) Merely because hydrocarbon fuels end, it does not follow that personal transporation vehiclkes will end.
Point 2) As time goes on, new technologies may make it cheaper to run cars, inflation adjusted.
Point 3) Suburbs should be required to be developed so as to mimize runoff and damage to surrounding areas.
Point 4) Not everyone wants to live in a freaking expensive tiny apartment on the 6th floor of a building in a pollution-infested urban wasteland.
Golly, I sure must have been a bit angry yesterday afternoon when I posted. I think instead of the term “going postal”, we should really say “going planner”.
Just a thought about automobile users paying for for the roads, gas, etc that pedestirans don’t use: Even if you don’t own a car (like me) and you walk or take public transporation everywhere (like me), just how do you think your groceries get your grocery store? Everyone benefits from autmobile transportation.
Counterpoint: If all the costs were put upon the automobile driver (or truck driver, etc.), I would still pay for it one way or another as the capitalistic system will ultimately bring the cost to me, the consumer, in the cost of whatever I buy or benefit from the use of the roads, petrolium, etc., just like a landlord facotrs his property tax into a tenant’s rent. In other words, consumers do ultimately shoulder the burden of that which they consume, in some form or another.
It is an interesting comparison of paying school tax, even if you do not have direct benefit from the schools. Hence, Florida’s difficult predicament with education having so many older residents who typically vote against necessary funding for schools. The justification for requiring school taxes is that it is ultimately better for society to have an educated population. (Note: I will not bring school vouchers into this example as it only opens up a much much more complicated idea.) So the debate over spreading taxes to help pay for roads, gas, etc., really becomes an issue of whether or not these things, like an educated society, are so necessary, and difficult to derive (equitably) without the benefit of taxes (as education seems to be), that it justifies making everyone pay for them, including those who do not use them directly.
But this is only one detail in the Smart Growth debate.
Gosh, I sure am much more civilized after a full night’s rest.
I see a lot of quotes like:
This is a false statement. The popularity of suburbs is because they are easy and cheap to build. In any area where you have a livable inner city, there is a huge demand to live there. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most people can’t afford to live in San Francisco myself included, because it’s so desirable that the prices are in the stratosphere. I’d like to live there, but can’t. So I have to live in a cheaper suburb. This is replicated all over the place. So even though the vast majority of people live in the suburbs, you can’t logically say that they prefer to do so when in fact the choice is not equal. It’s cheaper to live in the suburbs. And it’s cheaper because the supply is huge, ultimately because it’s easy to build.
Being easy and cheap to build is part of what people like about the suburbs.
This isn’t rocket science. If there were no customers for suburban living, no one would be selling it. The density of population in these areas will increase until economic forces make it unreasonable.
Passing zoning laws by definition involves using force to prevent people from doing what they choose to do. Maybe it would be better to consider that they might have some damned good reasons for their choices.
But somebody has to make decisions, Sam Stone. Building the kind of infrastructure it takes to make a city or suburb is a big project. People have to decide where to put roads. They have to decide if they want a sewer system. They have to decide how to place things like emergency services, schools and other public resources. “The individual” doesn’t up and decide he wants an eight lane highway. Some things require a such massive mobilization of resources that some group of people have to make a decision.
Right now those decisions are made by democratically elected local governments. So in a way at least, the “individual” does choose.
Anyway, the point is that somewhere along the line, a decision has to be made. Your libertarian wet dream where nobody ever makes any centralized decisions outside of the corporate framework has no place in a serious real world discussion of urban planning. We all know you want to do away with the government. And frankly that is as relevet to this discussion as my pinko wet-dream of a Marxist utopia. Aint gonna happen. Let’s get back to what we were talking about.
You do know that suburbia was essentially created by the government, right? It’s not some kind of natural form of living that we all graviate towards because it’s right. Suburbia as we know it is the direct result of the GI bill. Cities couldn’t handle the sudden influx of WWII veterens entitled to cheap mortgages. So they planned vast areas of small cheap houses to absorb them. The very centrally planned federal highway system encouraged it’s growth in the fifties and the rest is history.
We have planners because plans have to be made. And when those plans are made, it’s one situation where you are voting with your votes instead of your dollars. The planners are (hopefully) going to decide whats best for the city and it’s people in the long term, not the needs of one guy with a little bit of money in his hands and wants his McMansion and wants it now, future or sense-making be damned.
There’s a difference between planning to facilitate people’s choices, and planning to thwart them. It’s one thing to plan out a street grid and drainage patterns and such for an area facing an expansionary pressure, and saying, “I don’t agree with what these people want to do, not for reasons of local geology, road infrastructure stress, etc.”, and “I don’t believe that people should live in suburbs, so I won’t entertain requests to build in certain areas, even if it would be straightforward to expand the infrastructure to support it.”
Sam, there are no lack of suburbs for people to live in, if they want to. We should be expanding the supply of urban housing, however, because livable urban housing is in short supply relative to the demand.
You agree with me that it’s the pricing of suburbs that make them attractive. So, obviously the solution is to increase the supply of urban housing to bring down the price to a reasonable level, similar to the suburbs.
I don’t care how cheap it is to live in a urban apartment. I LIVE in an apartment complex in a small, but crowded town, and I HATE it. I moved here to be close to work, but regret it due to the inconveniences that come with the territory, and don’t wish to sign a lease elsewhere as I will hopefully be moving to Texas in the next 6 months.
But back to the Apartment: THe complex has no grass, as the units and walkways cover every inch of the place. There is no parking for more than one car per unit (and this is in garages built under the two buildings), except to crowd onto the already narrow street. It has 30 units, on perhaps 3/4 acre, but I imagine it’s even smaller than that. These aren’t ghetto-like in any way (1215/mo for a 1000 sq ft apt), just jammed together.
So, say I want to go to the grocery store. I’m not going to load 2 weeks worth of groceries onto my bike rack. I’m going to use my car, and go to either a nice store on the outskirts, or the run down, 1969 Safeway here. Wife and I want to go to dinner? We’re not going to walk on a date. We don’t pay a freakin’ car payment so that we can walk like hobos. So we drive. There’s no parking at any of the restaurants, as they are all built right at the edge of the road, so we have to drive through miles of congested, inneffecient streets to get to the freeway and get the hell out of this town, and over to Salinas, which understands that ample parking is a good thing.
Say I want to do shopping. Not the Macy’s variety mind you, the big basket of needed odds and ends from a discount store. Are there any discount stores here? Hell no. They can’t build here, as every building has been declared “historic” and can’t be razed. Therefore, I have to drive through the crap again, or go to one of these stupid local stores that have to charge extra to exist, and are propped up by local government that thinks efficient supercenters are “evil.”
Some people really get off on all this stuff. They walk to the overpriced downtown cafes, sip their latte, and pat themselves on the back for how intelligent and progressive they are to live in this retro-city. I don’t. I want a yard. Our first child is due any day now. There is NOWHERE in this complex for kids to play. There’s a park, but it’s a half mile away, and like everything else here, small and cramped.
Don’t get me wrong, I can understand the appeal of this place to certain people. If one has either never lived in a more open environment, or doesn’t want the upkeep of their own home, and most definately if they are retired and have nothing more to do than sit in a coffee shop and chew the fat, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is the place to be.
But not for me.
Also, don’t get me wrong from my initial post that I’m some type of gun-totin’, monster truck drivin’ fundy-nut. I drive one of the most fuel efficient cars on the market (Echo), support natural areas, greenways, parks, and preservation of sensitive wetlands and marshes. However, I refuse to continue to live and make my wife and coming child live in a conjested, polluted (though for what it’s worth, this area is fairly clean) inner city so that the Utopian pipe dream of some pseudo-Marxist can bear fruit.
I want my kid to see the outdoors as an integral part of life, where one can play, relax, swim, etc, and not as a jammed up wold of sardine packed urbanites. I’ll fight the SmartGrowth-er’s with my votes and my feet at every turn. Somehow a benign term has been perverted to mean “deliberate conjestion”
Slightly off topic from the OP, I must say that in my city (including all suburbs, about 3 million people), there is no reasonable choice but to live in the suburbs. Downtown, as much as it exists, serves as a monument to ages past; it lies in ruin. Property values are rediculously low; one of the larger towers in the city was recently sold for $1 (granted, with a guarantee that a minimum amount of money would be re-invested in it). Okay, my point isn’t very clear yet.
The city has been abandoned to a flood of urban poor.
Could my family move downtown? Yes. Is there anything sensible about that decision? Nope.
The only reasonable choice would be to live in the suburbs, which have evolved in a way which seems atypical from what I hear in this discussion. I’m within reasonable walking distance of about three supermarkets, retail stores, restaurants, an automobile assembly plant, numerous parks, two golf courses, four elementary schools and a high school. Now I don’t walk to these places frequently, and little exists by way of public transportation out here, but I could walk if I felt like it. This seems fairly typical of the suburbs here; essentially a small town of over a million people. It exists because people wanted to flee the city, and they don’t have much desire to go back.
Ok, what was I getting at? Suburbia seems to work here, and I imagine not having an automobile wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. The problem with the definition used in this thread seems to be the assumption that suburbia necessarily depends upon an urban environment for some vital component, and this simply doesn’t seem to be the case.
In fact, as far as I’m aware, property taxes here are lower than the national average and my town government has been in the black throughout the recession, even still building new highways and the like.
This is the classic evolution plan of large cities. They become donuts.
Early in the city lifecycle, a core of buildings forms near a primary resource like a river or a train station. Over time, people build more property around the core, and the core becomes the center of city life. Property values rise in the core. Businesses set up there, because they offer central access to all citizens.
Over time, the outlying regions grow, and the city center becomes congested and more difficult to live in. Urban flight begins. Eventually, the inner core starts to decay, and you wind up with the ‘donut’ shape of the city. Then cities try to cope with this. Here in Edmonton, they’ve tried everything from forced busing to inner-city schools to gentrification to building a huge interconnected mall in the center of the city. In most cities, the city center morphs into a commercial area for large corporations, and supporting businesses for all the employees that work in the high rise towers.
I think the idea of trying to jam people back into the city centers is just stupid. They left for a reason. A good reason. Leave them to their own choices.
Anyone really interested in this subject should check out How Cities Work, by Alex Marshall (2001). He attempts to draw lessons from what experiments in “smart growth” have been tried so far – for instance, in Portland, Oregon. He attempts to answer the question: Why does property in Celebration, Florida (Disney’s attempt to re-create a traditional American small town) cost so much more than property in Kissimmee, Florida (a real American small town right next door to Celebration)? Lots of informative, non-obvious facts are discussed – like the size of the customer base that retail businesses really need to survive. You can also check out Marshall’s website, www.alexmarshall.org.
The best writer, as a writer, on this topic is James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, and The City in Mind. He has a website too – www.kunstler.com.
The Congress for the New Urbanism had a website at www.cnu.org, but it seems to be down right now.
For an **anti-**smart-growth perspective, see Randal O’Toole’s The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths. Or the Website of his ThoreaU Institute at www.ti.org. Also Wendell Cox – you can read about him at www.publicpurpose.com or www.demographia.com.
Having perused these, I infer that people who oppose “smart growth” on principle are also very likely to be ideological Libertarians. So much the worse for Libertarianism! I wish it were possible to come up with a model of “smart growth” that Libertarians would find acceptable, but I can’t see how to get anything done in this sphere without governmental leadership.