In Honor of Yom Kippur (reposted)

AN AL CHET FOR ALL OUR POLITICIANS (Atlanta Jewish Times, 11-1-02)

It is appropriate that the political campaign season begins around Yom Kippur and ends with Election Dy since politicians have a lot for which to repent.
After watching a particularly reprehensible TV ad, I created a prayer to remind politicians of their campaign-season errors. Its modeled on the Al Chet prayer we say on Yom Kippur.
The politicians Al Chet would begin with the traditional opening for that prayer, which includes: Hide not Thyself from our supplication, for we are neither so arrogant nor so hardened as to say before thee, O Lord our God and God of our predecessors, `we are righteous and have not sinned; verily, we have sinned.
Then the politicians prayer would focus on sins commonly associated with liberals and those commonly associated with conservatives.
For the sin we committed by buying votes with taxpayers money, and for the sin we committed by putting future generations in debt to cut taxes today;
For the sin we committed by idolizing government, and for the sin we committed by making government the enemy;
For the sin we committed by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted;
And for the sin we committed by afflicting the middle class to make ourselves feel better;
For the sin we committed by pandering to the middle classs desire to cut its commutes by a few minutes while ignoring the working poors interest in health insurance and decent bus service;
and for the sin we committed by pretending that government could help the poor by forcing everyone to pay each other higher wages;
For the sin we committed by pretending schools could be saved by throwing money at them,
and for the sin we committed by ignoring differences between rich and poor schools;
For the sin we committed by unchastity, and for the sin we committed by focusing on our opponents personal lives;
For the sin we committed by veiled appeals to racism and [for the sin we committed by] frivolous accusations of racism;
For the sin we committed by letting government support illegitimate childbirth and the sin we committed by pretending all government spending goes to unpopular programs like welfare and foreign aid;
For the sin we committed by refusing to acknowledge that an embryo in a test tube is different than an already born human, and for the sin we committed by refusing to acknowledge that a fetus with arms, legs and a heart is different from an embryo in a test tube; For the sins we committed by ignoring the environment;
For the sin we committed by war-mongering and by using patriotism to justify every war,
For the sin we committed by spurning the insights of religion, and for the sin we committed by using religious issues to distract voters from issues that their daily lives;
For the sin we committed by accepting bribes disguised as campaign contributions,
For the sin we committed by reckless partisanship and slandering our opponents,
For the sins we committed by pandering to labor unions; and for the sins we committed by pandering to business;
For the sins we committed in the name of liberty, and for the sins we committed in the name of equality;
For all these, O God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

And to all candidates, I say what I say to myself as the gates of prayer close: Please try to do better next year.

a thought about urban growth boundaries

One thing that has always troubled me against the question of urban growth boundaries around cities. It seems to me that the regions where growth boundaries are most necessary and least likely to be harmful are precisely the regions where they are least likely to be tried.

How so?  Because in a slow growth, Buffalo/Cleveland type region, the costs from growth boundaries are low.  Due to slack real estate demand, it is unlikely that growth boundaries in such a region will lead to inflated
housing prices.  And because the city may die without growth boundaries, the benefits of growth boundaries are high.

By contrast, in a growing region such as Portland or Seattle, there are enough affluent people for city and suburb alike, so even without growth boundaries the core city will be moderately prosperous (at least compared to most Rust Belt cities).  Thus, the major benefit of growth boundaries(i.e. preserving the core key and its older suburbs as decent places to live*) are smaller in a growing region.

And where thousands of people are moving into the region every year, there is a fairly significant risk of growth boundaries causing housing price inflation. Thus, the costs of growth boundaries are higher in a Seattle or Portland than in a Buffalo or a Cleveland.

And yet it is precisely the fast growth regions where growth boundaries and similar experiments are most feasible politically.  Why?

*See my article on growth boundaries (available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=816885 ) which points out that Portland's growth boundaries have been more successful in improving the core city than in solving other problems such as traffic congestion.

I have two new articles out on SSRN

"Five Myths About Sprawl" (a review of Robert Bruegmann's Sprawl: a compact history) at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931251

 

"Planners Gone Wild" (a review of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking) at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931255

my article in today's Jacksonville paper

The URL is http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/090606/opl_4787662.shtml

(I added brackets because there are a couple of places where I think there may have been typos- ML) 

A recent article [in a neighborhood newspaper] praised the widening of Riverside Avenue just south of downtown to six lanes.

Says one local executive, the widening will make Riverside "the new gateway to Jacksonville."

Similarly, a local economic development official speculates that Brooklyn, a nearby residential area, might soon have "people who work in the area, live in the area, and take pride in the area."

In other words, our local businesspeople and planners seem to think that turning Riverside Avenue into a six-lane speedway will help developers turn Brooklyn into a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood.

But does anyone really want to walk across a six-lane street?

I certainly don't. When I have visited the six-lane part of Riverside Avenue, I don't feel particularly comfortable.

I feel like I am in a place that is made for cars rather than for people, and I feel like I have to be very careful before crossing the street. By contrast, I feel much more comfortable walking on the narrower streets in residential areas.

Narrower streets are more pedestrian-friendly for two reasons. First, a wide street takes longer for pedestrians to cross, thus increasing pedestrian commutes and increasing the amount of time a pedestrian is exposed to traffic.

Second, wide streets encourage cars to drive faster, thus increasing the frequency and severity of pedestrian injuries.

A motorist driving at high speeds has more difficulty paying attention to the surrounding environment: The faster you drive, the harder it is for you to slow down in time if you see a pedestrian in front of you.

And car crashes are more lethal as cars go faster:

 

The probability of a pedestrian being killed by an automobile is only 3.5 percent when the auto is traveling at 15 miles per hour.

 

The fatality rate increases to 37 percent if the auto is traveling at 31 miles per hour.

 

It jumps to 83 percent if the auto is traveling 44 miles per hour.

So what? Why should anyone care if Riverside Avenue is pedestrian-friendly, as long as traffic flows more quickly? Hasn't the growth of suburbia proved that most people would rather be surrounded by speeding cars?

Avondale and San Marco, two of Jacksonville's most walkable neighborhoods, are also two of its most expensive - evidence that some people are willing to pay more for the privilege of being able to walk across narrow streets rather than sprinting across six-lane boulevards.

Clearly, the demand for walkable neighborhoods outstrips the supply. By contrast, Jacksonville's supply of six-lane and eight-lane speedways is virtually unlimited, so we don't need any more of them.

It logically follows that by widening Riverside Avenue, the city may have actually made the surrounding neighborhood less appealing to would-be residents - bad news for the new residential developments slated for Brooklyn.

It could be argued that even if walkability will spur residential growth, traffic flow should be the city's first priority in commercial areas such as the northern part of Riverside Avenue. Since most commuters drive to work, anything that makes commuting faster for business.

But a look near downtown Jacksonville [shows that] vehicle-first street design and prosperity do not always go together.

The relatively narrow streets near City Hall and the new library have begun to attract residential development and are also thriving during work hours, while the wider, more auto-oriented streets further west are wastelands 24 hours a day.

[It follows that] Maybe a downtown neighborhood unfriendly to pedestrians will, in the long run, have difficulty competing for businesses.

So the next time the city wants to promote a downtown neighborhood, maybe it should make the streets narrower instead of wider, perhaps by widening sidewalks and medians, and by planting more trees to create additional shade for pedestrians.

Michael Lewyn teaches at Florida Coastal School of Law.

and ANOTHER myth to rebut - birth rates and density
Joel Kotkin wrote in a recent article for Newsweek,  "Once everyone is forced into a small city place, there's literally no room left for kids."

There might be densities where there is "no room left for kids." But not in America.  A recent New York Times article  notes that Kiryas Joel, NY (a Hasidic enclave) has 18,000 people in 3000 families on 1.1 square miles.  When you do the math, you find that this community has around 16,000 people per square mile (more than any American city but NYC) and 6 people per family, a lot more than most American households.  

Commuting times out of control in suburbia- or, another prosprawl myth rebutted

 

I've seen the argument made that sprawl doesn't increase commuting times because jobs follow people to suburbs, and so suburbanites have shorter commute times than they would if their jobs were in the city.

 But this article in today's Washington Post suggests otherwise. 

The article notes that in metro DC, residents of DC and Arlington had the shortest commutes (29 and 26 minutes respectively).  By contrast, residents of exurban Prince William County had the longest (41 minutes).   Other suburbs had in-between commuting times.

What's going on?

First, Prince William is not one of the more job-rich suburbs.  To the extent "job sprawl" benefits commuters, it benefits only the ones who live in the job-rich suburbs (in DC, Loudoun and Fairfax Counties more than Prince William).  If you live in a less job-rich suburb, your commute might be longer than if you worked downtown.

Second, even if moving to a job-rich suburb to follow your job reduces your commute, other people in your household may still have a downtown job- which means the increase in that person's commute cancels out the decrease in yours. 

For example, suppose my wife and I live downtown; my job is 8 miles out in suburbia and hers is a few yards away, so we have a total commute of 8 miles.

A year later, we move to suburbia, 2 miles from my job and 10 miles from my wife's downtown job.  I am better off, but our total commute is 12 miles- far worse than when we lived downtown.

another Jewish voice against sprawl

The prophet Zechariah states "Old men and old women will yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem."

R. Soloveitchik interprets this statement to mean that after the final redemption of the Jews, "Jerusalem will be densely populated, even by elderly men and women. A young man likes to be on the street, but an old man likes to be home. But the city was going to be so populous that there would be no room for the elderly at home, so they will have to sit on the street."

The Lord is Righteous in All His Ways, p. 47

Evidently, Messianic deliverance means MUCH more compact development!

We're healthier than ever

some of my friends think that Americans have become less healthy due to junk food and pollution.

But a recent story in yesterday's NY Times suggests otherwise. (link at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/health/30age.html?ref=health )

Money quotes:

Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone "a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth."

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person's chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.

The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.

"What happens before the age of 2 has a permanent, lasting effect on your health, and that includes aging," said Dr. David J. P. Barker, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southampton in England.

Each event can touch off others. Less cardiovascular disease, for example, can mean less dementia in old age. The reason is that cardiovascular disease can precipitate mini-strokes, which can cause dementia. Cardiovascular disease is also a suspected risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.

The effects are not just in the United States. Large and careful studies from Finland, Britain, France, Sweden and the Netherlands all confirm that the same things have happened there; they are also beginning to show up in the underdeveloped world.

Of course, there were people in previous generations who lived long and healthy lives, and there are people today whose lives are cut short by disease or who suffer for years with chronic ailments. But on average, the changes, researchers say, are huge.

Even more obvious differences surprise scientists by the extent of the change.

In 1900, 13 percent of people who were 65 could expect to see 85. Now, nearly half of 65-year-olds can expect to live that long.

People even look different today. American men, for example, are nearly 3 inches taller than they were 100 years ago and about 50 pounds heavier.

"We've been transformed," Dr. Fogel said.

What next? scientists ask. Today's middle-aged people are the first generation to grow up with childhood vaccines and with antibiotics. Early life for them was much better than it was for their parents, whose early life, in turn, was much better than it was for their parents.
....Scientists used to say that the reason people are living so long these days is that medicine is keeping them alive, though debilitated. But studies like one Dr. Fogel directs, using records of of Union Army veterans, have led many to rethink that notion.

The study involves a random sample of about 50,000 Union Army veterans. Dr. Fogel compared those men, the first generation to reach age 65 in the 20th century, with people born more recently.
The researchers focused on common diseases that are diagnosed in pretty much the same way now as they were in the last century. So they looked at ailments like arthritis, back pain and various kinds of heart disease that can be detected by listening to the heart.

Skip to next paragraph
The New Age
Older and Better
This is the first article in a series looking at the science of aging. Other articles will explore the genetics of aging, body image and frailty, and who ages well and why.

Multimedia

Video: The New Aging

Graphic: People Today Have Fewer Chronic Illnesses

Graphic: Longer Lives, Larger Bodies
Related
Living Large and Healthy, but How Long Can It Go On? (July 30, 2006) The first surprise was just how sick people were, and for how long.

Instead of inferring health from causes of death on death certificates, Dr. Fogel and his colleagues looked at health throughout life. They used the daily military history of each regiment in which each veteran served, which showed who was sick and for how long; census manuscripts; public health records; pension records; doctors' certificates showing the results of periodic examinations of the pensioners; and death certificates.

They discovered that almost everyone of the Civil War generation was plagued by life-sapping illnesses, suffering for decades. And these were not some unusual subset of American men - 65 percent of the male population ages 18 to 25 signed up to serve in the Union Army. "They presumably thought they were fit enough to serve," Dr. Fogel said.

Even teenagers were ill. Eighty percent of the male population ages 16 to 19 tried to sign up for the Union Army in 1861, but one out of six was rejected because he was deemed disabled.

And the Union Army was not very picky. "Incontinence of urine alone is not grounds for dismissal," said Dora Costa, an M.I.T. economist who works with Dr. Fogel, quoting from the regulations. A man who was blind in his right eye was disqualified from serving because that was his musket eye. But, Dr. Costa said, "blindness in the left eye was O.K."

After the war ended, as the veterans entered middle age, they were rarely spared chronic ailments.

"In the pension records there were descriptions of hernias as big as grapefruits," Dr. Costa said. "They were held in by a truss. These guys were continuing to work although they clearly were in a lot of pain. They just had to cope."

Eighty percent had heart disease by the time they were 60, compared with less than 50 percent today. By ages 65 to 74, 55 percent of the Union Army veterans had back problems. The comparable figure today is 35 percent.

The steadily improving health of recent generations shows up in population after population and country after country. But these findings raise a fundamental question, Dr. Costa said.

"The question is, O.K., there are these differences, and yes, they are big. But why?" she said.

"That's the million-dollar question," said David M. Cutler, a health economist at Harvard. "Maybe it's the trillion-dollar question. And there is not a received answer that everybody agrees with."
...Common chronic diseases - respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems - have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.

The reasons, she and others are finding, seem to have a lot to do with conditions early in life. Poor nutrition in early years is associated with short stature and lifelong ill health, and until recently, food was expensive in the United States and Europe

...Dr. Fogel and Dr. Costa looked at data on height and body mass index among Union Army veterans who were 65 and older in 1910 and veterans of World War II who were that age in the 1980's. Their data relating size to health led them to a prediction: the World War II veterans should have had 35 percent less chronic disease than the Union Army veterans. That, they said, is exactly what happened.

Skip to next paragraph
The New Age
Older and Better
This is the first article in a series looking at the science of aging. Other articles will explore the genetics of aging, body image and frailty, and who ages well and why.

Multimedia

Video: The New Aging

Graphic: People Today Have Fewer Chronic Illnesses

Graphic: Longer Lives, Larger Bodies
Related
Living Large and Healthy, but How Long Can It Go On? (July 30, 2006) They also found that diseases early in life left people predisposed to chronic illnesses when they grew older.

"Suppose you were a survivor of typhoid or tuberculosis," Dr. Fogel said. "What would that do to aging?" It turned out, he said, that the number of chronic illnesses at age 50 was much higher in that group. "Something is being undermined," he said. "Even the cancer rates were higher. Ye gods. We never would have suspected that."

Men who had respiratory infections or measles tended to develop chronic lung disease decades later. Malaria often led to arthritis. Men who survived rheumatic fever later developed diseased heart valves.

And stressful occupations added to the burden on the body.

People would work until they died or were so disabled that they could not continue, Dr. Fogel said. "In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85," he said. Now the average age is 62.

A century ago, most people were farmers, laborers or artisans who were exposed constantly to dust and fumes, Dr. Costa said. "I think there is just this long-term scarring."

Searching for Answers

Dr. Barker of Oregon Health and Science University is intrigued by the puzzle of who gets what illness, and when.

"Why do some people get heart disease and strokes and others don't?" he said. "It's very clear that current ideas about adult lifestyles go only a small way toward explaining this. You can say that it's genes if you want to cease thinking about it. Or you can say, When do people become vulnerable during development? Once you have that thought, it opens up a whole new world."

It is a world that obsesses Dr. Barker. Animal studies and data that he and others have been gathering have convinced him that health in middle age can be determined in fetal life and in the first two years after birth.

His work has been controversial. Some say that other factors, like poverty, may really be responsible. But Dr. Barker has also won over many scientists.

In one study, he examined health records of 8,760 people born in Helsinki from 1933 to 1944. Those whose birth weight was below about six and a half pounds and who were thin for the first two years of life, with a body mass index of 17 or less, had more heart disease as adults.

Another study, of 15,000 Swedish men and women born from 1915 to 1929, found the same thing. So did a study of babies born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine, known as the Hunger Winter, in World War II.

That famine lasted from November 1944 until May 1945. Women were eating as little as 400 to 800 calories a day, and a sixth of their babies died before birth or shortly afterward. But those who survived seemed fine, says Tessa J. Roseboom, an epidemiologist at the University of Amsterdam, who studied 2,254 people born at one Dutch hospital before, during and after the famine. Even their birth weights were normal.

But now those babies are reaching late middle age, and they are starting to get chronic diseases at a much higher rate than normal, Dr. Roseboom is finding. Their heart disease rate is almost triple that of people born before or after the famine. They have more diabetes. They have more kidney disease.

That is no surprise, Dr. Barker says. Much of the body is complete before birth, he explains, so a baby born to a pregnant woman who is starved or ill may start life with a predisposition to diseases that do not emerge until middle age.

The middle-aged people born during the famine also say they just do not feel well. Twice as many rated their health as poor, 10 percent compared with 5 percent of those born before or after the famine.

"We asked them whether they felt healthy," Dr. Roseboom said. "The answer to that tends to be highly predictive of future mortality."

But not everyone was convinced by what has come to be known as the Barker hypothesis, the idea that events very early in life affect health and well-being in middle and old age. One who looked askance was Douglas V. Almond, an economist at Columbia University.

Dr. Almond had a problem with the studies. They were not of randomly selected populations, he said, making it hard to know if other factors had contributed to the health effects. He wanted to see a rigorous test - a sickness or a deprivation that affected everyone, rich and poor, educated and not, and then went away. Then he realized there had been such an event: the 1918 flu.

The flu pandemic arrived in the United States in October 1918 and was gone by January 1919, afflicting a third of the pregnant women in the United States. What happened to their children? Dr. Almond asked.

He compared two populations: those whose mothers were pregnant during the flu epidemic and those whose mothers were pregnant shortly before or shortly after the epidemic.

To his astonishment, Dr. Almond found that the children of women who were pregnant during the influenza epidemic had more illness, especially diabetes, for which the incidence was 20 percent higher by age 61. They also got less education - they were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. The men's incomes were 5 percent to 7 percent lower, and the families were more likely to receive public assistance.

The effects, Dr. Almond said, occurred in whites and nonwhites, in rich and poor, in men and women. He convinced himself, he said, that there was something to the Barker hypothesis.

 

 

 

unclear on the concept

Last night I was talking to someone who lives in my new [sprawl suburb]
neighborhood.

She says she sees people walking all the time.

I say "but I go on San Jose Blvd. (the neighborhood commercial street, photo
at http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p29142204.html)  and I don't see many
people walking at all."

She says "but that's a busy street."

Gee, in a civilized city wouldn't you want to walk on the street where all
the businesses are? But that's what bad street design does to people.

what I've been reading (1-1 to 7-7)

 

1. Hirsch Chumash

2. Breyer, Active Liberty

3. Hoffman et. Al. My People’s Prayer Book: vol 7, Shabbat at Home

4. Hirsch, Nineteen Letters

5. Epstein, A Conspectus of the Public Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Solovetchik

6. Diamond, And I Will Dwell In Their Midst

7. Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding

8. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State

9. Daniel Schiff, Abortion in Judaism

10. Robert Bruggeman, Sprawl

11. Crooks/Arsenault, Jacksonville

12. Bartley, Keeping The Faith: Race, Politics and Social Development in Jacksonville, 1940-70

13. Soloveitchik, Festival of Freedom

14. Roth, The Halakhic Process

15. Fishkoff, The Rebbe’s Army

16. Breuer, Modernity within Tradition

17. Ginzberg, Students, Scholars and Saints

18. Steinsaltz, We Jews

19. Grant, The Jews in the Roman World

20. Kranzler, Hasidic Williamsburg

21. Solomon, Global City Blues

22. Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

23. Ortiz, Eva Peron

24. Kellner, Must A Jew Believe Anything?

25. Cowley, What Ifs of American History

26. Feagin, Free Enterprise City

27. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine

28. Queenan, Queenan Country

Kotkin rides again

Kotkin had another weird piece on Newsweek that I thought deserved a good whack. My responses are in italics.

July 3-10, 2006 issue - Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope. For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the "new suburbanism." And not only in the land of free-ranging suburbs, America.

Me:The claim that new urbanism is "built around downtown revival" is a misrepresentation.  There are quite a few new urbanist developments in small towns and suburbs (such as Seaside and Celebration).  In fact, some pro-urban commentators (Alex Marshall comes to mind) denounce New Urbanists for being willing to build in suburbia. 

Very clever of Kotkin to use the term "starchitects" to make New Urbanists seem out of touch with reality.  When you can't win the argument, fight with epithets.

 

In contrast to the powers who fight "sprawl," advocates of the new suburbanism focus on ways to make the periphery work better.

Me: again, see Celebration (and for that matter, other New Urbanist developments like Kentlands and King Farm), all New Urbanist attempts to make the periphery work better.  

It's about bringing business and jobs, not just bedrooms, to the outer rings, and reviving main streets in smaller towns and cities, not just in major urban centers. In some senses, the new suburbanism seeks to recover the ideals of early advocates of decentralization such as the early-20th-century British visionary Ebenezer Howard, who proposed dispersing populations into largely self-sustaining "garden cities."

Me: There you go again.  We've tried decentralizing jobs for 50 years, and all we've gotten for it are commutes that get longer ... and longer ... and longer.  Even though the average commute has increased only slightly, the number of 90-minute commutes has nearly doubled since 1990.  (See  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_08/b3921127.htm ) What Kotkin fails to realize is that if the boss moves to northern suburb X and then moves the company along with him, that's great for the boss.  And its even great for the other workers who live in northern suburb X.  But the workers who live in the southern suburbs are worse off than if they worked downtown, because they have to travel twice as many miles.  And the workers who live in the city might as well be dead.  The major reason they moved to the city may well have been to be close to work and have a less car-centered life.  And instead they have to buy a car and drag themselves to northern suburb X every day.  And if they are too poor to afford a car, they have a 90 minute commute on two or three buses if the job is on a bus line, and are out of work if its not.

Correcting the problems of suburbia is an international imperative. Almost everywhere, cities tend toward sprawl, more like much-maligned Los Angeles than like Manhattan, the urbanist's heaven.

Me: Define "tend."  In Tokyo, 70% of the commuters get to work through transit, biking or riding - in Stockholm, 69%, in Munich 62%.  I don't see a tendency towards sprawl there.

This pattern owes largely to the preference of the middle and working classes for privacy and space—choices ridiculed as boringly bourgeois by urban theorists. "L.A. is the realization of every immigrant's dream—the vassal's dream of his own castle," observed the Italian-born, Los Angeles-based urbanist Edgardo Contini in the 1960s. "Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home." Today, surveys find that 70 to 80 percent of Americans prefer a single-family home and only 15 percent, an apartment in a dense urban area.

Me:  Ah, yes, the false dichotomy, between single-family homes (which, in Kotkinland, must always be in suburbs) and apartments (which must always be in the dense urban area).  Most people of course prefer owning to renting, given the American dream of getting rich off real estate investments.   But another survey asked a different question (this time of Houston voters):

Would you personally prefer to live in a suburban setting with larger lots and houses and a longer drive to work and most other places, or in a more central urban setting with smaller homes on smaller lots, and be able to take transit or walk to work and other places? 

55 percent preferred the more urban setting.  (See http://www.blueprinthouston.org/documents/blueprint_survey_results.doc ).  If you ask the question a little differently you get a very different answer!

you get a different result.  For example: a survey in Houston asked

These preferences are increasingly universal. In Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia, growth is spilling out of urban centers, even in places that boast extensive mass-transit systems. In London, the center has been losing population since at least the 1960s.

Me: Wrong.  Inner London lost population for many decades - but like New York City, it has been regaining population for the past two decades.   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_London

In fact, Inner London is doing slightly better than outer London.  Inner London's population has increased from 2.5 million to 2.9 million since 1980 (about a 15% increase)- the population of Greater London as a whole increased from 6.8 million to 7.5 million (about 10%).  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London )

 As H. G. Wells predicted a century ago, much of southern and central England is a vast suburb of the capital. In Frankfurt, the suburbs now reach out as far as 80 kilometers and in Paris, the center is losing about 1 percent of its population annually as businesses and the middle class move out past the heavily immigrant banlieues. In Japan, too, high prices and congestion have propelled an exodus: between 1970 and 1995, 10 million people settled in suburbs around the main cities of the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki.

Me: Wrong again. Tokyo is following the same path as London- some depopulation, but increased population in the last couple of Censuses. http://www.chijihon.metro.tokyo.jp/english/PROFILE/OVERVIEW/overview3.htm

And the repopulation of Tokyo and London is a lot more noteworthy than population increases in the USA.  The USA has had about 17% growth since 1990 (from 250 million people to 293 million) - so with a tide rising that fast a lot of votes will be lifted.  Due to plunging birth rates, Japan's population grew by about 3% (from 123 million to 127 million) and Britian's by about 5% (from 57 million to 60 million). 

The impulse of many authorities is to try to stop sprawl and the problems (particularly overdependence on cars and malls) it brings. Planners in cities from Sydney to Portland, Oregon, have imposed "anti-sprawl" strategies that attempt to force people back into dense concentrations. Sydney's strict land-use regime, now under attack from both the political left and right, is helping drive up home prices—and drive young families to less highly regulated Australian cities. In Portland, a similar campaign is pushing development beyond the reach of city planners, across the Columbia River to Washington state.

Me: Sydney's population has increased by about 20% since 1991 (from 3.5 million to 4.2).  See http://www.citypopulation.de/Australia-Agglo.html  

I don't know my way around Australian census data well enough to focus on "young families" specifically.  But given Kotkin's error-filled discussion so far I doubt he knows more than I do. As far as Portland goes, the city of Portland's population grew from 368,000 in 1980 to 533,000 in 2004- not exactly a place where development is being "pushed" to suburbia.  Does Mr. Kotkin think Detroit or St. Louis (both of which have lost over 20% of their 1980 population) are more successful?

In contrast, the new suburbanism seeks not to fight market forces, but to address the problems. Many of the brightest ideas can be found in planned communities, often modeled on Howard's garden cities, such as Valencia, California; the Woodlands, outside Houston; Reston, Virginia, or Marne La Vallée outside Paris. They are not mere bedroom communities with malls but boast well-developed business parks, town centers and, in some cases, notably the Woodlands, a large amount of well-preserved, natural open space. Other successful models are being developed in older suburbs. Fullerton, California, and Naperville in Greater Chicago have revived abandoned core districts as centers for entertainment, dining and community events. Naperville has also developed a lovely riverside park that attracts strollers, hikers and bicyclists.

Such patterns of enlightened suburban development could be applied around the world.

Me: The only one of these places that I've been to is Reston. It struck me as a not very well done version of the New Urbanist developments that Kotkin sneers at- a nice little pedestrian-friendly shopping area ringed by a moat of sprawl streets that a pedestrian would be highly unwise to cross.  And outside the shopping area its the usual sprawlscape isn't it?

I do think Kotkin actually has a point here.  It is important to improve suburbia; but it takes more than just a shopping district to get it right.

 Many nations still get it wrong, building anonymous tracts 30 to 50 kilometers from the closest jobs or town center, mainly as bedroom communities for a big city. A leading example of enforced centralization is Seoul, where the average density of more than 14,000 people per square kilometer is three times London's, five times L.A.'s and 10 times that of growing U.S. cities like Houston or Phoenix.

Me: I don't even know what he's saying here.  Is Seoul an example of "anonymous tracts 30 or 50 miles out" or an example of "enforced centralization."?

Greater Seoul, in short, is almost hostile to human life, a widening ocean of high-rises with a shrinking number of traditional Korean houses.

Me: If its so hostile to human life, how come 10 million people live there? 

 Suh Yong-bu, a Korean expert in business demographics, notes that high housing prices and cramped spaces have helped send Korea's birthrate into free-fall, down 30 percent since 1993;

much the same problem is felt in other ultra dense urban societies like Japan and China. "The same patterns can be found throughout Asia," notes demographer Phil Longman, author of the "The Empty Cradle," a study of world population trends. "Once everyone is forced into a small city place, there's literally no room left for kids."

Me: Let's run some numbers (from our friendly US Statistical Abstract, not any fancy shmancy foreign web sites):

                 Population density      Birth rate per 1000

                 per square mile 

South Korea    1277                     10.1

Japan              835                     9.6

UK                  646                     10.9 

Germany          609                      8.5

Italy               511                       9.1

China              361                      13.0

France             287                      12.3

Spain             209                        10.1

The above table compares Kotkin's unholy trinity (China, South Korea, Japan) to five affluent European countries. 

South Korea, the only nation that really is much denser than the rest, has a birthrate that is higher than two of the European countries, the same as Spain, and only slightly lower than Britian and those of France).  Japan is also ahead of two of the five. 

China has a somewhat higher birth rate- but then again, China isn't even "ultra dense", so here Kotkin flat-out doesn't know what he is talking about.  Maybe birth rates have more to do with affluence than density.

Certainly, the history of the United States bears this out.  American cities were much denser 60 years ago; St. Louis, for example, had more than twice its current population in 1950.  But were birth rates really lower?

Um, no.  The American birth rate plunged from 24 per 1000 in 1950 to 14 per 1000 today (Statistical Abstract, Table 72).

Now it may be that there is a birth rate problem in big, dense cities.  But Kotkin sure hasn't made the case.

We now see the beginnings of a battle over the future of the suburbs. In Britain—where suburbs are home to roughly half the population, but the bias of most planners and politicians is still toward the city—there's a growing movement to bring arts, from galleries to symphonies, to smaller villages. The increasingly high cost of city living may help pro-suburban forces from Britain to Japan, where the government also fights sprawl with limits on megamalls and other measures.

Perhaps the ultimate test will come in the fastest-growing major economies, India and China. Mall developers like Aeon Co. Ltd. (the same people now being told to back off in Japan) are rushing to build suburban homes and shopping areas in India, outside Mumbai, and in China outside Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Beijing. Many of them are following American, Australian or Canadian models. There's one Chinese development named "Orange County," named after the famous southern California suburb. To hip urbanites, of course, that will sound like a bad joke. To the world's aspiring majority, it sounds like a bright promise.

Me: First of all, how does Kotkin know what the "world's aspiring majority" thinks?  Has he polled the hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians?  And doesn't the existence of these suburban developments have something to do with the fact that governments are essentially subsidizing these developments with highways?  (See http://www.china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/99324.htm - Chinese highway system has doubled since 1980; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highways_Development_Project - India planning major highway expansion).

interesting Brookings study on decline of middle-class neighborhoods
That can be found here.

Brief summary: cities have fewer middle-class neighborhoods, many more rich and poor ones.

 Most surprising facts (on p. 10): though most cities gained both rich and poor, most cities gained a lot more poor than rich since 1970.

For example, Atlanta experienced a 22% increase in the number of very low income (50% of regional median or less) areas, and only a 9% increase in high income areas (150% or more of regional median).  And Atlanta was the most gentrifying city (of twelve listed) in this respect.  By contrast, Baltimore experienced a 26% increase in very low income areas, and only a 1% increase in rich areas.

Conclusion: the extent of gentrification is clearly overrated.  For every neighborhood that has "flipped" towards wealth, two or more have "flipped" towards poverty.

I realize that these numbers would look a little different if they were calculated only on a 1990-2000 basis (when cities generally did better than in previous decades). Nevertheless, the basic concern underlying complaints about gentrification (that cities are running out of poor neighborhoods) is just rubbish. Most cities have far a more bounteous supply of poor neighborhoods than they did before 1970, let alone before 1950.

well put

“there is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst of us, that it hardly pays for any of us to talk about the rest of us.”

From Arnold Goodman, one of my former rabbis

busyness and sprawl and crime

(Cross-posted to property professors' blog, see Barros blog in list of blogs to left) 

In my experience, most people who discuss the relationship between urban decay and crime treat the relationship as a one-way street: city crime causes people to leave cities, period.

But in Nicole Garnett's review of Bruegmann's and Joel Kotkin's new books (posted on SSRN, and referred to in a post on this blog a few days ago) she suggests that lower urban densities might induce crime by making cities less "busy" and more deserted- and thus that (to oversimplify the point into a sound bite) that sprawl might even cause crime in a sense.

I'm not sure there's any way to prove or disprove the theory- but if the argument is verifiable, it certainly leads to some interesting results.

Let's go back to the 1930s, when the FHA started to bribe people to move to suburbs with mortgage subsidies and all levels of government were beginning to make suburban commutes easier through road-building.  A few people leave the (now safe) cities.  Over the next few decades, a few city neighborhoods here and there become less busy and thus more dangerous, and the most risk-averse people start to trickle out.  This causes neighborhoods to become even less busy and more dangerous which cause even more people start to trickle out, and eventually we have a vicious circle on our hands- a vicious circle that spirals out of control in the 60s (when for reasons unrelated to urban policy, crime increases everywhere in the United States).

And depopulation causes other problems that independently might increase crime.  A city without a large middle and upper class might support more lenient policing policies which in turn might lead to more crime - another respect in which sprawl (or more accurately, the type of sprawl that depopulates cities, as opposed to sprawl in growing regions where there is enough population growth to build up city and suburb alike) might increase urban crime.

Two caveats:

1.  All of this is pretty speculative.

2.  I think it is easy (but mistaken) to assume that crime is a problem that can be resolved solely through more enlightened city government.  Even if you assume for the sake of argument that the criminal justice system has a major effect on crime (as opposed to, say, liberal morality, economic inequality, or family breakdown), criminal justice is more of a federal and state responsibility than a local responsibility.  Cities may hire police, but states decide whether to build enough prisons to house the people arrested by city police, and both federal and state courts set the rules that decide how crowded those prisons can be and how easy it is to convict people arrested by the city police.   

more on Bruegmann- the universality of sprawl

(Cross-posted to property professors' blog, see Barros blog in list of blogs to left)

After a few weeks of being out of town, I got back to Bruegmann. One of his most widely publicized points is the universality of sprawl- the idea that because some rich people had country estates one or two or twenty centuries ago, the status quo is just fine. This argument rests on the assumption that if some sprawl is OK, lots of sprawl is even better.

But this kind of argument overlooks
important differences of degree: every city may have some sprawling development, but not all cities are identical.

In the most
sprawl-bound cities and metropolitan areas, most residents will be unable to get to
classes, jobs or shops without driving, and carless residents are thus virtually helpless. For example, in Oklahoma City, a city with over
500,000 people, buses do not run at night or on Sundays, and thus the 8.2% of households without cars are essentially frozen out of jobs that require evening work.

And in cities planned around the automobile, streets are often so wide, and traffic moves so
quickly, that the basic human act of walking outdoors becomes dangerous. Even
residential streets are often dangerous for pedestrians due to the absence of sidewalks.

In such cities, most people need a car to function.

By contrast, less sprawling regions give residents a variety of transportation options. For example, the majority of New York City residents get to work via public transit, and the city has prosperous neighborhoods where most households own no cars. In metropolitan New York, transportation choice is not limited to city residents: New York City has some highly automobile-dependent suburbs, but also has two suburbs where a majority of commuters use public transit regularly. In other words, New York, to a greater extent than other American cities, accommodates both consumer preferences for automobile-dependent sprawl and consumer preferences for less automobile-dependent lives.

So how much sprawl is too much? And how do you define "too much" sprawl?

It seems to me that if you need a car to live in a place, that place has too much sprawl- because at that point sprawl becomes not a result of consumer choice but a burden on consumer choice, freezing people who (for one reason or another) can't drive out of civic life, and imposing huge costs on people who can. In essence, the costs of car ownership in a place like Oklahoma City are a tax just like the sales or income tax (at least to the extent those costs are a result of government policy which encourages car depedence, an issue that I have discussed in numerous articles, some of which can be found here.)

The common pro-sprawl argument that Europe is "just like us"
I am starting to draft a book review of Robert Bruegmann's book on sprawl, and I notice that he's relying on one argument that I've seen before but haven't really researched in the past: the idea that Europe is sprawling just like us, so therefore sprawl must be inevitable and universal.

This argument is not completely without factual support: to be fair, auto ownership and use has grown in Europe, and auto commutes as a percentage of all trips has increased.

But reality is more complex than this simple picture suggests.

First of all, between 1991 and 2002 (the last date for which I could find figures) the automobile share of transportation has increased- but only modestly, from 83.4% to 84.9%. In some countries, the auto market share has held steady or decreased. In Great Britian, the auto market share held steady at about 88%. In Denmark, the auto market share decreased from 82.3% to 80.3%. In Austria, the auto market share decreased from 79.5% to 76.3%.

Moreover, transit ridership has increased. Between 1995 and 2003, regional streetcar and subway ridership increased by 12.5% and bus ridership by 3.7%. (See Table 3.3.2 of This European Union report. )

What about central city decline, another index of sprawl? In Europe, as in America, many cities lost population in the late 20th century. But in Europe, as in America, many core cities are rebounding. According to this report, about half of European cities regained population in the late 1990s.

If "sprawl" means the existence of some development everywhere that resembles American sprawl, yes, sprawl exists everywhere. But if sprawl means the fate of Detroit or Cleveland in the 1ate 20th century- nosediving transit ridership, dying inner cores, the whole ball of wax, sprawl isn't universal at all.

Site

One of my old speeches reposted (given at National Building Museum in 2001)
On sprawl as a conservative issue.

Blogging from EDRA conference
Last week, I attended the EDRA conference in Atlanta and heard a lot of interesting presentations. To name a few:

*Ryan Gravel, of the Atlanta Belt Line project, discussed the Belt Line: a light rail line which will encircle the city. It will be more like a trolley (stopping every half mile or so) than like a subway- less expensive, less elaborate stations. He thinks the first station will be built by 2015 or so. After listening to him, I thought that coming home to Atlanta didn't seem like such a bad idea. One reason it is likely to happen is that this sort of small project is much easier to finance than a subway: the city could, through the miracle of tax increment financing, take property tax revenue from the areas served by the Belt Line and use that revenue on the Belt Line.

*A bunch of architectural professors talked about crime and the built environment- specifically addressing issues like whether cul-de-sacs or grid streets affect crime, etc. Bottom line: studies conflict. Linda Nubani of the American University in Dubai suggested that more "connected" areas were just as safe as they were stable, homeowner-oriented areas, but NOT if they were marginal, renter-dominated areas. So maybe cul-de-sacs reduce crime in slums but not in suburbs- an inversion of the actual urban landscape.

*Jim Durrett (formerly of ULI, now of the Livable Communities Coalition) spoke about the growth of New Urbanist communities in metro Atlanta, and discussed how zoning impedes their growth. For example, in Forsyth County a zoning variance is necessary to put trees, rather than a lawn, in front of a house.

*Robert Bullard of Clark Atlanta spoke about environmental justice, and pointed out how the poor suffer from the absence of decent supermarkets in urban areas. (Though of course, when Wal-Mart wants to build something in a poor area, the unions are up in arms, claiming that everyone is better off if the poor are limited to mom-and-pop convenience stores).

*Jude LeBlanc and Michael Gamble of Georgia Tech spoke about how to remodel Buford Highway, a heavily immigrant-oriented street in Atlanta that is notoriously hostile to pedestrians. Even though the street has some of Atlanta's most interesting restaurants (esp. Asian restaurants) it is seven lanes wide and often has no sidewalks. (A few photos of Buford Highway are on my Atlanta photo site.

Sidewalks are already being built on Buford Highway. But LeBlanc and Gamble suggested a lot more, including: (a) medians so pedestrians could have a refuge if they could not cross all seven lanes in time, (b) eliminating setback and parking requirements so buildings could front the desk and pedestrians would not have to trudge through both parking lots and the seven lanes, (c) allowing long, narrow buildings and arcades to bridge the gap between sidewalks and existing shops. Also, if sidewalks and medians were wider, the street could be reduced to the four or five lanes that are typical of most Atlanta arterials. (The reason Buford Highway is so wide is that it was apparently built before I-85 and was thus expected to be the region's major site for northeast-bound traffic).

*A speech about Serenbe, an attempt to adapt some New Urbanist principles to a rural setting. Serenbe's developers are creating four mini-towns (about 100 houses each, I think) all within walking distance of each other and of small-scale shopping- kind of the opposite end of the size spectrum from gigantic projects like Atlantic Station (which I saw on an EDRA tour of New Urbanism in Atlanta, as well as the much smaller Glenwood Park project).

And I gave a speech myself, about This article. (to be published in modified form in the Quinnipiac Law Review).

I won the (Latke-Hamantash) debate
A description of the Latke-Hamantash debate (which at least a couple of people seem to think I won, if you scroll down to the bottom!)