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Joel Kotkin and other promoters of the status quo keep telling us that outside the United States, sprawl is the wave of the future.
But the Chinese disagree; they are planning to build six new subway lines in Beijing.
http://www.cctv.com/program/bizchina/20071017/104833.shtml
Joel Kotkin wrote an article for the Washington Post; as usual, his work got under my skin. Here's the article and my comments:
By Joel Kotkin and Ali Modarres
Sunday, October 14, 2007; B01
It's all the suburbs' fault. You know, everything -- traffic congestion, overweight kids, social alienation. Oh, and lest we forget, global warming and rising energy costs, too.
That latest knock against the burbs has caught on widely. With their multiplying McMansions and exploding Explorers, the burbs are the reason we're paying so much for gas and heating oil and spewing all those emissions that are heating up the atmosphere -- or so a host of urban proponents tells us. It's time to ditch the burbs and go back to the city. New York, Boston, Chicago -- these densely packed metropolises are "models of environmentalism," declares John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who now heads the Congress for a New Urbanism.
MY COMMENT: It is simply not true that New Urbanists want to "ditch the burbs and go back to the city." America's suburbs are full of New Urbanist developments- Celebration near Orlando, Kentlands near Washington, and so on. New Urbanists want to improve the suburbs, not "ditch" them.
But before you sell your ranch house in Loudoun County and plunk down big bucks for that cozy condo in the District, take a closer look at the claims of big cities' environmental superiority. Here's one point that's generally relegated to academic journals and scientific magazines: Highly concentrated urban areas can contribute to overall warming that extends beyond their physical boundaries.
Studies in cities around the world -- Beijing, Rome, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and more -- have found that packed concentrations of concrete, asphalt, steel and glass can contribute to a phenomenon known as "heat islands" far more than typically low-density, tree-shaded suburban landscapes. As an October 2006 article in the New Scientist highlighted, "cities can be a couple of degrees warmer during the day and up to 6¿ C [11 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer at night." Recent studies out of Australia and Greece, as well as studies on U.S. cities, have also documented this difference in warming between highly concentrated central cities and their surrounding areas.
COMMENT: Kotkin's argument is as follows: cities create heat islands. Therefore, suburbs are good and cities are bad. But this begs the question: which kind of cities create heat islands? It may be true that cities are warmer than suburbs. But it is not therefore true that "highly concentrated central cities" are warmer than sprawling, car-depedent essentially suburban cities. Automobiles contribute to the heat island effect (http://www.heatislandmitigationtool.com/Documents/detailed_help.pdf page 2) as does paving over vegetation to build parking lots and roads (http://www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces/articles/Urban%20Sprawl%20and%20Public%20Health%20-%20PHR.pdf , page 206). Automobiles and pavement are more common in car-dependent cities; thus, it may be that such cities actually create greater heat island effects than does development of more traditional cities. For example, Houston, one of America's most sprawling, more car-dependent big cities, has a heat island comparable to that of other cities (http://www.harc.edu/Projects/CoolHouston/ )- hardly the result we would expect if dense cities were hotter than sprawling cities. At any rate, Kotkin doesn't bother to discuss this issue- to him, all cities are the same.
This is critical as we deal with what may well be a period of prolonged warming. Urban heat islands may not explain global warming, but they do bear profound environmental, social, economic and health consequences that reach beyond city boundaries. A study of Athens that appeared this year in the journal Climatic Change suggested that the ecological footprint of the urban heat island is 1 1/2 to two times larger than the city's political borders.
COMMENT: This argument seems inconsistent with the prior paragraph. First Kotkin argues that suburbs are good because they don't experience heat islands. Then he argues that the city's heat island extends beyond the city's borders. Joel Kotkin, meet Joel Kotkin.
Further, urban heat islands increase the need for air conditioning, which has alarming consequences for energy consumption in our cities. Since air conditioning systems themselves generate heat, this produces a vicious cycle. Some estimate that the annual cost of the energy consumption caused by the urban heat island could exceed $1 billion.
COMMENT: U.S. GNP is about $10 trillion. Given this fact, $1 billion isn't a lot of money.
This is not to say that big buildings can't be made more energy efficient by using new techniques, such as high-tech skin designs, special construction materials to reduce energy consumption, green roofs and passive cooling. But one big problem is that making large buildings green also makes them much more expensive, so that they're less and less affordable for middle-class and working-class families.
Low-density areas, on the other hand, lend themselves to much less expensive and more environmentally friendly ways of reducing heat. It often takes nothing more than double-paned windows to reduce the energy consumption of a two- or three-story house. Shade can bring it down even further: A nice maple can cool a two-story house, but it can't quite do the same for a 10-story apartment building.
COMMENT: Perhaps it is cheaper to cool one house than one 100-unit apartment building. But that doesn't mean it is cheaper to cool 100 such houses than it is to cool the apartment building. Thus, cooling the apartment building may be cheaper on a per-household basis.
Focusing on the suburbs has the added virtue of bringing change to where the action is. Over the past 40 years, the percentage of people opting to live in cities has held steady at 10 to 15 percent. And since 2000, more than 90 percent of all metropolitan growth -- even in a legendary new planners' paradise such as Portland, Ore. -- has taken place in the suburbs.
So we shouldn't be trying to wipe out suburbs.
COMMENT: Again, Kotkin is pretending that someone is trying to "wipe out suburbs."
Even with changes in government policy, it would be hard to slow their growth. Europe has strict zoning and highly subsidized mass transit -- policies that are supposed to promote denser development -- but even so, their cities are suburbanizing much like American ones.
COMMENT: In Stockholm, only 31% of people drive to work. In Jacksonville, 92% do so. If you think Stockhom is "suburbanizing much like" Jacksonville, your definition of words such as "much" and "like" must be very different from mine.
"Sprawl cities," notes Shlomo Angel, an urban planning expert at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, also are becoming ever more common throughout much of Asia and the developing world.
Here's an Earth-to-greens message: Instead of demonizing the suburbs, why not build better, greener ones and green the ones we already have?
COMMENT: Which, of course, is exactly what Greens and New Urbanists want to do.
One approach might be to embrace what one writer, Wally Siembab, has dubbed "smart sprawl." Encouraging this sort of development will require a series of steps: reducing commuters' gas consumption with more fuel-efficient cars, dispersing work to centers close to where workers live and promoting continued growth in home-based work.
COMMENT: But not all workers live in the same suburbs. If a job moves to a suburb 10 miles northeast of downtown, that's good news for the people living north of downtown- not so good for the people living in suburbs south of downtown. Of course, realistically this is about race- jobs tend to move to the richest, whitest suburbs, which are usually pretty far away from the poorer, blacker suburbs. For example, in Atlanta, whites have been moving north and blacks have been moving south and east. So when jobs move to the northern suburbs, guess whose commute gets longer?
We'll also have to protect open spaces by monitoring development and establishing land conservation based on public and private funding, the latter coming from developers who wish to work in suburbs.
Building what we call "an archipelago of villages" seems far more reasonable than returning to industrial-age cities and mass transit systems. For the most part, the automobile has left an indelible imprint on our cities, and in our ever-more-dispersed economy, it has become a necessity.
COMMENT: Self-fulfillling prophecy.
This is not to say that transit of some kind -- perhaps more cost-efficient and flexible dedicated busways, or local shuttles -- can't play a role in serving those who can't or would rather not drive. But short of a crippling fuel shortage or some other catastrophic event, it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see the widespread success of heavily promoted strategies such as dense, transit-oriented developments or the wholesale abandonment of the suburbs.
We can accommodate our need for space and still leave ample room for a flourishing natural environment, as well as for agriculture. By preserving open space and growing in an environmentally friendly manner, we can provide a break from the monotony of concrete and glass and create ideal landscapes for wildlife preservation.
Such notions -- developed before the term "green" existed -- go back to a host of visionaries such as Ebenezer Howard, James Rouse, Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright and Victor Gruen. And they have already been put into practice. Starting in the 1960s in his development of Valencia, north of Los Angeles, Gruen envisioned a "suburbia redeemed" that mixed elements of the urban and the rural.
Valencia's elaborate network of 28 miles of car-free paseos -- paths designed for pedestrians and bicyclists -- helped make the natural environment accessible to residents. Gruen also recognized the commercial appeal of such an environment. A 1992 ad for the development featured a smiling girl saying: "I can be in my classroom one minute and riding my horse the next. I don't know whether I'm a city or country girl."
Similarly, The Woodlands, a sprawling development 27 miles from downtown Houston, is a model for a greener suburbia in a region not much celebrated for its environmental values. The Woodlands name, said its former president, Roger Galatas, was seen not as "just real estate hype" but as part of a plan to allow development without destroying forest lands and natural drainage.
In the Washington area, Reston and Columbia, the latter the brainchild of legendary Maryland developer James Rouse, have become far more than mere bedroom communities; they have become places, or villages, in themselves.
All these places evoke a more environmentally friendly suburbanism, which also can be promoted in areas that did not benefit from the foresight of a Gruen or a Rouse. Town centers, revived older shopping districts, even re-engineered malls can all be part of a greener, more energy-efficient future in a large number of communities. And this process is already well underway.
Dragooning Americans into a dense urban lifestyle that's attractive to only a relatively small minority isn't the best way to address concerns about energy and resource depletion or global warming. Instead, we need to take gradual, sensible, realistic steps to improve the increasingly dispersed places where most of us choose to live and work.
Last week I tried a non-rush hour car commute.
Left 7:16
Got to office parking lot 7:34
Got in office 7:37
21 minutes.
Big picture: driving takes 20-25 minutes door to door
Transit takes 35-50 (depending on how long I wait for the bus). On balance, driving superior if I'm in a real hurry; otherwise, transit has the advantage that the extra time is mostly exercise so I can use it, and I can read during the rest of the time.
I drove to work today. Here's the results:
Get out the door 7:41
Finish cleaning dew off car 7:43
Arrive at law school 8:04
At door 8:07
26 minutes - I was surprised that I had less than a 2-1 gap between transit and driving. Then again, this was hard-core rush hour. Based on prior experience, I think I would have saved 5 minutes or so had I left earlier or later.
Going to work
Leave apt 6:55
Arrive at bus stop 7:01
Bus arrives around 7:08 or 7:10
Get off bus 7:21 (this time the right stop!)
Arrive in office 7:35
Coming home
Left office 7:31
Arrived at bus stop 7:45
Caught bus 7:48
Arrived San Jose Blvd. 8:02
Arrived home 8:06
Bottom line: public transit commute of 35-40 minutes.
I just moved to an apt complex in Mandarin from another further out in Mandarin. Here was my first commute:
Left home 6:51
Got to bus stop 6:57 (way too early)
caught bus 7:09
bus got off at stop 7:28 (could have been a minute earlier because I got off at wrong stop)
got to door of office 7:42
bad news: 51 minute door to door.
good: most of it wasn't really wasted. 18 minutes walking, and on bus had conversation with someone I know from shul, and looked at news online via my cellphone.
Also, commute could have been shorter if I'd (1) not gotten to bus stop so early and (2) got off at right stop- probably about 10 or 12 minutes faster.
How does it compare to driving? Next time I drive I'll blog about it. My guess is that driving time = on bus time. So much longer commute on bus, but I'm using those extra 30 minutes walking or reading.
My latest Folio Weekly piece at
http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/43/
Regarding danger to the planet from global warming:
Puhleeze. Global warming will at worst be a minor inconvenience to the
planet. The planet has done just fine since everyone was a bacterium, and oxygen was a toxin. Killing off a few billion of us will hardly be a blip.
Of course, billions of dead people will put a serious crimp in our plans.
(from a listserv I'm on).
Was on a full JTA bus and actually had to stand for the first time since moving to Jacksonville a year ago!
I was visiting the Museum of Southern History on the Westside, and at 4ish took the P4 bus back to downtown, and it was clogged with people coming from the far Westside (apparently to change buses downtown, since most people did not leave the bus till then).
An article calling for zoning deregulation:
http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/40/
An article explaining how Jacksonville's zoning code yields sprawl (basically going over the same terrain that my scholarship addresses but in less technical terms):
http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/38/
An article describing life without a car in Jacksonville:
http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/36/
An article criticizing proposed highway expansion:
http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/33/
is available at
http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/39/
JTA wants to shift service from Baypine Road (the street where my employer, Florida Coastal School of Law is located) to Baymeadows Way nearby, despite the fact that Florida Coastal has 1400 students.
Why? Because the speed bumps slow the commutes of bus riders coming in from downtown.
Lesson- don't have speed bumps on any streets where people might want to ride the bus (i.e. streets with offices and jobs).
From now on, this blog will be focused on Jacksonville (my new hometown) since I now know enough to coherently discuss life here. To reflect this, the blog has a new title ("Lewyn Addresses Jacksonville").
Please note the Jacksonville-related links on the bottom left.
Defenders of sprawl like to claim that they are for "The American Dream."
But this is MY American Dream:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OzzflJTn_wE
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sTOfV9oaPrM
At CNU XV, Barney Frank argued that smart growth supporters should support liberal Democrats, because Republican support for tax cuts and military spending leaves no room for smart-growth oriented programs such as public transit, HOPE VI, etc. I think this story provides some ammunition on both sides of the argument:
But see the following story from the LA Times (full story at
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-budget20jul20,0,5439437.story )
"State lawmakers appeared to be closing in on a spending plan late Thursday that would divert roughly $1 billion away from mass transit, forcing Los Angeles to put off plans for extending parts of the Expo light rail line and widening some freeways.
***
Democrats said they agreed to the big cut to transit funding in an effort to avoid having to take money away from schools and healthcare programs. Republicans justified the cut by noting that state transportation funding will continue to increase overall."
What grabbed me was the last paragraph: the Democrats wanted to cut transportation to fund public education and health.
This is why I don't think left-wingers are necessarily better than right-wingers on urbanism issues: just as the Right will always pick tax cuts and wars over smart growth-type programs when money is tight, the Left will always pick public education and health care.
Of course, if you think public education is a better use of money than tax cuts, you will probably vote for liberals anyhow: but you shouldn't be doing it because of their superior commitment to urbanism.
For what its worth, I do think there are differences among candidates- but I think the issue cuts across left/right lines. From what I've learned of the candidates, some are more oriented towards transit and urbanism than others: Richardson on the Democratic side has said some good things, and Romney on the Republican side has a good record. Bloomberg is very pro-transit but isn't likely to win as an independent.
I don't know enough about the candidates to know if any are really hostile to smart growth. However, I suspect most of the candidates just don't care much about these issues one way or the other. For example, I don't know of any evidence that these issues take up a single brain cell in the brains of Fred Thompson or John Edwards.
Obama and Giuliani SHOULD be good because they live in cities: but your zip code doesn't necessarily dictate your thought processes on these kind of issues.
I was the subject of an editorial in the Jacksonville paper today.
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/061107/opi_175705775.shtml
The posts below discuss some of what I learned at the CNU (Congress for New Urbanism, www.cnu.org) conference in Philadelphia.
One interesting panel dealt with the question of how to keep streets skinny and walkable while satisfying fire departments. Dan Burden noted that fire marshals generally prefer 20 feet of space to accommodate fire trucks; he suggested accommodating them through midblock curb extensions; thus, a street can be 20 feet wide for motorists, but fire trucks can find extra space in the middle of the block so they can unload bulky fire equipment. John Anderson was less optimistic, suggesting that New Urbanists may need statewide fire code reforms in order to force public works departments to accept narrower streets.
This afternoon, Andres Duany spoke about the relationship between cities and suburbs. He began by noting that contrary to popular myth, New Urbanists are quite involved in urban development; the only reason people think otherwise is that NU development fits into cities rather than sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.
But most of his speech addressed how suburbs outcompete cities, and how cities can learn from suburbs. He focused on the following:
1. Amenities. The suburbs' major amenity is spare land: larger back yards, etc. In the mid-20th century, cities tried to compete by echoing the suburbs, with lower density, more parking, more greenspace, etc. This strategy failed miserably- why have a half suburb when you can have the whole thing? Instead, cities should focus on their chief amenity, the public realm. A healthy city has a better public realm, better streets, than suburbs. This is the one area in which suburbs cannot compete with downtowns. Density is necessary for this, but it is NOT sufficient- high density sprawl with no streetlife cannot compete with low density suburbia, which is why so many older suburbs are fading.
How do you get healthy streetlife? Mixed use. Without mixed use you have lunch-only restaurants in downtowns that die after dark.
Bring in activities used every day. Focus on (and subsidize if necessary) activities used regularly, NOT activities used once in a while. Yes to movies and restaurants used every day. No to football stadia used 8 times a year, or festivals that occur once a year.
2. Comfort- Cities must not only be safe, they must feel safe. It is not even enough to be as safe as 1950 Detroit, with less street crime than today but still plenty of beggars, trash, graffiti etc. Cities must feel as safe as suburbs do today. How does this work? Start with a few blocks; create more surveillance, both with cameras and by individual municipal officials. (On the other hand, in marginal neighborhoods where this is least practical, appeal to the risk-oblivious).
3. Schools- If you want families, you have to have schools which appeal to suburbia. If not, forget about families and appeal to singles and empty nesters. (Duany didn't speak about how to fix schools- wisely, given the complexity of the topic).
4. Predictability- Investors like predictability; suburbs provide predictability by ensuring that if you comply with their master plan, you can build instantly. To be fair, large suburban developments do require developers to run a political gauntlet. But smaller developments are permitted virtually instantly, because there is a master plan that allows development as of right. By contrast, in cities even smaller developments require NIMBY-fighting and lawyers. A strong plan is the remedy for this - cities should create comprehensive plans that allow development as of right and thus ensure that developers don't have to worry about rezoning, NIMBYism etc. In other words, given the ubiquity of zoning, planning actually means MORE property rights, not fewer, in an urban environment.
5. Retail- A lot of New Urbanists deplore out of town chains. But out of town chains often have better product selection and more appealing packaging, lighting etc. than "mom and pop" stores. A business district without national chains can't compete with suburbia. (It is not clear whether Duany thinks this is equally true of "Big Box" retail such as Wal-Mart).
6. Private governments- Suburbs have private governments (homeowners' associations, etc.) that are smaller, and thus more responsive, than city governments. If cities can duplicate this they will be more appealing.
The good news: just as traditional urbanism is infecting the suburbs, good government is infecting cities through business improvement districts that function as private governments.
On Saturday morning at CNU, there was a great panel on expressways, focusing on the removal of riverfront expressways that cut off downtowns from rivers.
Ingrid Reed spoke about her experience in Trenton, where she was able to challenge the status quo on two grounds. First, removing the expressway would create jobs, housing and prosperity, by freeing up riverfront land for commercial and residential development. By contrast, today riverfront land is cut off from downtown by the expressway, essentially blighting such land. Second, Trenton suffers from minimal traffic congestion, so the arguments against removing the expressway are weaker than they would be in a bigger, more congested city.
Cary Moon spoke about her experience in Seattle, where the city is trying to decide whether to build a new expressway to substitute for one damaged in a 2001 earthquake. Again, the argument against a new highway is based on downtown development: a riverfront connected with downtown is a prosperous riverfront bustling with parks, people and businesses, a riverfront cut off from downtown is Blight-O-Rama. Moreover, the experience of San Francisco (where earthquake-damaged expressways were removed without drastically harmful results) shows that highway removal need not result in gridlock.
Moon pointed out that the anti-highway case is stronger in Seattle than in other cities, because even if the city plans to build a new expressway, it will have a one-year transition between the end of the old road and the birth of the new: so Seattleites will already have had a year to adjust to a status quo without a riverfront expressway. Moreover, Seattle has another expressway running through its very narrow downtown.
Moon argued that the downtown expressway was not necessary to facilitate freight traffic, because only 4% of the expressway traffic was freight; most of the traffic was just local trips seeing a shortcut through downtown. Moreover, recreating the pre-expressway street grid might actually reduce congestion, because drivers idle in traffic waiting to get on and off congestion instead of being able to use the new streets that would emerge from the ruins of the highway. She also suggested building freight-only lanes for freight traffic and bus rapid transit to soak up commute traffic.
The ultimate result: in a recent referendum, voters voted against two expressway proposals (one above ground and one that is 1/3 underground)- partially because of anti-highway efforts, but partially because supporters of each freeway alternative eviscerated each other's proposals.
Norm Marshall (of smartmobility.com) disucussed the use and misuse of traffic models. Often, state DOTs use misleading interpretations of models to justify more roads. For example, the Washington DOT stated that downtown Seattle traffic would grow from 110,000 vehicles today to 130,000 in 2030. But buried in an appendix to a DOT report are statements suggesting the contrary.
Even when DOT claims about traffic are not completely false, their data projects are flawed in a variety of ways. Their pretensions of precision overlook the possible adjustments that could take place when a freeway is torn down or not built: in addition to changing routes or using public transit, drivers could take trips at different times of day or forego them entirely. Also, freeways (or their absence) create land use changes that increase or decrease vehicle trips- for example, by facilitating downtown development (if a freeway is torn down) or sprawl (if a new freeway is built). Even if a model could accurately forecast such adjustments, transportation models can't possibly forecast broader social changes such as energy prices or social changes such as telecommuting.
Marshall's bottom line: models might be useful to test different scenarios- but any model that pretends to tell you how many cars will be in downtown Seattle in 2030 is just a pile of rubbish.
Jeff Tumlin asserted that freeways export real estate value from cities to suburbs; their absence maximizes cities' property value. He used Vancouver as an example of life without freeways: while downtown vehicle trips increased in every other Canadian city since 1995, such trips decreased in Vancouver- even while total trips (including walking/transit/bike trips) increased by 22%!
Tumlin suggested that within a downtown, freeways may actually reduce capacity, because preexisting downtown streets are destroyed to build the freeway. In short, a freeway downtown is like a pig in a parlor- the right thing in the wrong place.
