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What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create Affordable Cities?
- castratikron 10y agoIt's cheaper only because nobody pays the true cost of transportation. Make gas $8 a gallon to cover for the damage to the environment and suddenly sprawl won't seem so cheap.
- ianai 10y agoLast I heard it was more like 16/gal
- 24gttghh 10y agoHere's an actual study [1] from 2015, as opposed to hearsay, that suggests +$3.80/gal for gas and +$4.80/gal for diesel to represent the environmental damage. [1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-015-1343-0 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-015-1343-0
- hx87 10y agoIn that case everyone in the burbs will just buy a Leaf, Bolt, Volt or Model S/X to bypass the cost of gasoline.
- Tiktaalik 10y agoThis is why municipalities are pressing higher order governments to move to comprehensive road pricing instead of gas taxes.
- hx87 10y agoIt's a good step forward, as long as the pricing scales with the amount of damage a car does to roads when driven. A heavy truck with skinny tires should pay much more than a 2 door convertible with fat tires. Base it on average recommended tire pressure, perhaps?
- mjevans 10y agoI'd actually like to see the tax on businesses relative to the distance their employees commute. As a bonus, without changing other rules, this also makes part time labor filling a full time job less cost effective.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoYep! that's how you do it. But the poor schmoe who has a magnetic sign and ladder on his old pickup will suffer for it, and we have integrated that into our politics. See also Jimmy Carter.
- castratikron 10y agoA big gas tax will hurt rural areas the most. Maybe we could base the tax on the population density of an area, and give electric car tech time to trickle down into less populated regions until we ultimately start turning up the heat there, too.
- ocschwar 10y agoThe main obstacle to building upwards in American cities is the illegality of it. It's zoned, and coded and regulated to death, and can only be done in a small portion of the land around. Suburban sprawl, meanwhile, remains actively subsidized. So if your high rise builders are hobbled, OF COURSE more sprawl will be the only way to address increasing demand.
- arbuge 10y agoSource? I suspect that building say 200 apartment units requires similar red tape whether done vertically or horizontally.
- ocschwar 10y agoVisit strongtowns.org and citylab.com among other sites.
- jseliger 10y agoTokyo is also never mentioned in the article: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c..., but it should be.
- jessaustin 10y agoThe example of Tokyo undermines GP but actually confirms TFA. Lots of medium-rise buildings, extending to the horizon in all directions. The excellent transit makes the situation (only) somewhat bearable. Commute times are inversely proportional to income, up to a point.
- WildUtah 10y agoThere are eight megacities of 10MM or more people in the first world. Some of them sprawl, others allow reasonable densities in newly built neighborhoods. Reasonable density, in this case, means 100 or more, about what you get from building 2-3 stories, allowing buildings with very small setbacks, not requiring excessive parking, and allowing retail and commercial uses to mix in neighborhoods. Most highly desirable San Francisco neighborhoods are built at such density but such building is illegal in America. Here they are, in order of inaccessibility and unaffordability to the middle class. 1. New York (Sprawls) 2. London (Doesn't) 3. Los Angeles (Sprawls) 4. Paris (Doesn't) 5. Tokyo (Doesn't) 6. Mexico City (Doesn't) 7. Seoul (Doesn't) 8. Osaka (Doesn't) San Francisco sprawls and matches the high end of the list. Not much evidence for the op's thesis.
- vonnik 10y agoThis article and the study it cites miss the point. Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone else as cheaply as possible. They are markets for jobs, goods and services. When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl, they have effectively failed. In a sense, they are not really cities, but just agglomerations of many towns without a center. This describes many so-called cities in America, with LA being one of the most egregious examples. One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been entrusted to, well, developers. Those are the contractors that Buildzoom addresses as its audience, and the website is flattering their sensibilities. They like a supply chain that involves suburbs with lots of cookie-cutter mini-mansions. Easy to commodify and sell, and someone else can worry about the commuting headaches.
- mzw_mzw 10y agoYou're speaking as if people exist for the benefit of cities and not the other way around. Some people like living in more quiet, open, kid-friendly spaces: i.e., suburban sprawl. If a city can't provide that for them, they are under absolutely no obligation to get cut down to fit in the urbanist Procrustean bed.
- TulliusCicero 10y agoNothing wrong with suburbs, but many American policies have basically forced sprawl even when people might like moderate levels of density. A good example of this is Level of Service, a policy that dictated for decades that roads be evaluated by how many cars they moved in a given amount of time. People going by other modes? Safety? Measuring how long it actually takes people to get where they need to be? Not important; always cars, always faster. One of the dumb things about American cities is that you have big cities with large apartment complexes and sprawly suburbs and not a whole lot in between, which is entirely due to policies, not the choices of individual families or developers. See: http://missingmiddlehousing.com http://missingmiddlehousing.com
- 2AF3 10y ago
- squozzer 10y agoFew people outside of Manhattan picture a home as an office building with a doorman. A few (closer to 20 now that I looked) years ago, Atlanta had a mini-boom of hi-rise condo building. A couple of the properties did very well; they were mostly pre-sold, though probably to speculators. Some of the others had trouble selling all their units. Going vertical also brings a problem, mentioned by another commentor, of "viewing" rights (i.e. no blocking the views of established properties.) I think Trump had a similar problem with one of his projects.
- arjunnarayan 10y agoThere's an easy solution to this: remove all notion of "viewing rights". You have no right to your view, or your lack of density, or any such NIMBY invented property rights. This works great for Tokyo, and housing prices are very cheap. http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-c...
- jandrese 10y agoNIMBY types vote. You try telling them that someone can put up a hideous skyscraper between their house and the mountains/ocean/etc... and they'll have you on your ass in the street come November. Their parents bought that house. They've lived in it all their lives. Now you want to ruin the view and gentrify the neighborhood just because you think single family detached homes have no business being within a mile of the city center? Half of the legislature lives in those neighborhoods! All you are going to do is attract undesirables anyway.
- mjevans 10y agoIf viewing rights exist they should be taxed (at a premium). The valuation should be greater than the loss of all the affected height-lines.
- arjunnarayan 10y agoEasier still to take the Coasian view. Viewing rights (by default) do not exist. You are free to side contract with other property owners to ensure your viewing rights by paying them.
- astrodust 10y agoThis article is a load of garbage. It's not a dichotomy between towers and sprawl. There are cities that strike a balance between these, with mid-ride and high-rise depending on the neighborhood and the intended use of the properties. You can have human-scale development, buildings 5-7 stories tall, moderate density that promotes local commerce, safe environments for children and other vulnerable groups, easy access to amenities, and much more.
- niftich 10y agoCan you provide an example city built in this style somewhere in the US, to help me evaluate its success?
- honkhonkpants 10y agoPhiladelphia. Madison. HTH.
- niftich 10y agoThe areas of Philadelphia that are built in this style can hardly be called a 'safe environment', unfortunately [1]. Madison, however, on first blush seems like an excellent example, in that it's a large (~250k) city ranked highly on most metrics, and has a mid-rise downtown. But a look at a satellite image reveals that the city limits of Madison contain large areas of single-family detached houses, and mid- and high-rises are restricted to the Isthmus and areas immediately surrounding the University [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia#Crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia#Crime [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Madison,+WI/@43.0850975,-89.4764601,27073m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x8806536d3a2019ff:0x4e0cfcb5ba484198!8m2!3d43.0730517!4d-89.4012302 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Madison,+WI/@43.0850975,-8...
- honkhonkpants 10y agoMadison is interesting because it limits height to no higher than the Capitol dome, which isn't particularly high, but also allows a pretty high density by right in most neighborhoods. You could buy a property in Madison and put a three-flat dwelling on it with minimal red tape. If you tried that in SF you'd be dead before all the permitting went through.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago" . . . a website for contractors." I think that might be relevant. Not that I expect the WSJ to challenge the status quo. Any serious analysis would have to consider Copenhagen, Paris, Singapore, Austin at the least. And take livability analyses seriously, too.
- vertex-four 10y agoBut it doesn't matter if everyone's miserable so long as they're working 9 to 5 (or longer) - why would you think it does? /s
- cestith 10y agoRelax zoning so you can have more jobs near housing. Then you won't have hundreds of acres of homogenous tract housing that requires such a long commute. Houston has no single major business district. It does have a serious lack of solid transit. But if you want to live close to work, that doesn't necessarily mean in the "downtown" area like in many cities. There are huge concentrations of offices and stores in the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, Upper Kirby, the Bush airport area and several suburbs/exurbs.
- sologoub 10y agoThe article fails to break out cost of building versus cost of litigating to be able to build. They mention the NIMBYs, but without putting dollar or % value on what costs they create. Santa Monica and West LA are great examples - costs and rents have skyrocketed. However, much of the land is 1-2 stories, if that. Large portions of the housing stock is more than 50 years old. If they were to make it 3-4 stories instead (hardly Manhattan density, or even SF), we could fit 2-3x people no problem. Unfortunately, between zoning, NIMBYs and rent control, you can pretty much forget about it.
- heurist 10y agoIt's not. I'd recommend Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" to anyone interested in a comprehensive picture of what it takes to make cities livable: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0... Also read up on all the work Singapore is doing to increase density without ruining their economy or environment while improving livability. And some further reading on the dynamics of city growth: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013541 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... I love thinking about this stuff, complex and fascinating :)
- krob 10y agoThis is funny. Singapore is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. Density there, people work so many jobs just to live in the smallest possible dwellings.
- acconrad 10y agoI have this theory that autonomous vehicles will enable a resurgence of the suburb. If I can disengage from the transporting myself into being transported, I can spend that travel time working instead of navigating. If I lived an hour away from work but I could spend 2 hours working via my car, I'd have no problem moving to the suburbs. But as it stands right now, the commute is the part that really freaks me out.
- epa 10y agoIt seems to me like the real solution to a lot of traffic and affordable housing problems is 'work-from-home' ideology. In the 1800s it was common for business owners to contract with homesteads to produce good for them, which is then picked up and sold in markets (i.e. shoes). These 'workers' were free to find work as they chose between seasons. Of course, a very different world now with scheduled mortgage payments and other needs, however there must be a tipping point. The 'sharing/contractor' economy seems to be an inevitable ideological revolution.
- sunstone 10y agoCity "connectedness" is much more about time than space. So fast, affordable, convenient transport (a la Hong Kong) can make a big city feel smaller. Cars are the problem not the solution.