What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create Affordable Cities?
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
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.
Bullshit!
Look at the zoning codes for most cities. This is one of the most regulated markets in the US!
Minimum setbacks, heights, parking minimums, lot sizes, allowed uses - the list goes on and on, and is extremely prescriptive and detailed.
For instance, here in Bend Oregon, you can look through the city code for parking minimums:
"Beauty parlor and Barber shop: 3 spaces for each of the first 2 beauty or barber chairs, and 1½ spaces for each additional chair"
And this is pretty typical in the US.
Edit: I'll add that I am not a libertarian "markets solve all problems" kind of guy, but housing/land use is absolutely something where I think we could use more markets. I highly recommend these books:
The Rent is Too Damn High: http://amzn.to/2cxlP87
The Gated City: http://amzn.to/2cf7jBo
As well as this site: http://marketurbanism.com/ (some of those guys are pretty hard core libertarian, but I guess we can agree to disagree on many things and concentrate on markets and urbanism).
http://marketurbanism.com/2016/06/02/houston-beautiful-yet-p...
But it is affordable, which is good.
This is specifically the opposite of the case. Developers would happily build New York and San Francisco up into the stratosphere if it were legal. It's not, so they have to build out instead. This is 100% determined by the regulatory structure that legalizes sprawl and prohibits densification.
In these "rest of the country" places, you can't have a meaningful conversation about housing problems, because the residents will point to the suburbs/exurbs and say "those are still affordable -- that's where the middle class should go". Which is a better situation than say San Francisco, but it's still bad -- it's generating even more sprawl and further kills public transit (as this article highlights).
New dense urban construction in small Midwest cities is close-to-identical (within 10-15%) to top ten market pricing, even though wages are still 20-40% lower on average, and construction costs + land costs are lower. Small and medium sized Midwest cities cut themselves off at their own feet, building lots of "urban" housing that's priced identically to places like Seattle / Portland / Denver. They then act really surprised/frustrated when working class people complain about housing costs and gentrification in their "low cost of living" cities.
A $300k housing unit in "the rest of the country" is often just as unaffordable as say, a $600k housing unit in Seattle, if you measure that cost in terms of percent of paycheck -- which is what working class people rent/purchase housing with.
It's simple math. If the cost of building the development + required infrastructure is less than the price can sell it for then things will get built. It's the responsibility of the city to bundle the infrastructure requirements onto the building permit.
Trains do not get a lot of eminent domain help, instead their is a lot of work to build within existing right of ways.
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
And kids, in my experience, hate suburbia, especially as they get into early teens and want some independence. It's like living in a giant protective bubble where there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, without having to have someone's parents cart you around.
Surely whatever dangers kids are exposed to in cities absolutely pale in comparison to the increased risk of car accidents caused by living in the suburbs, where virtually every outing requires a lengthy trip by car.
Look around "kid-friendly" suburbia, and there's practically no kids outside.
Then again, suburban dwellers aren't totally crazy because our large cities are also built for cars with space for people as a complete afterthought most of the streets in Minneapolis need a road-diet. In Minneapolis, we invented the mall (Southdale), which sucked all the retail life out the city then we added the 'Mall of America' just to finish the job, to add insult to injury we built preposterous skyways which divides what's left of our paltry street-life onto two levels.
I really should move to Europe: Paris, Milan, Utrecht, Munich, London, Budapest, Prague... heartbreaking beauty.
What people are referring to on this thread is really exurbs.
The one catch is the risk of my kid being squished like a bug by idiot suburban drivers.
Good for them. If that's what they want then they should pay for it in a free and open market. I shouldn't have to subsidize their preferences via restrictive zoning.
That is your rightful opinion, but it's not everyone's opinion. As someone who already lives in SF, I believe SF exists to stay nice and to not be overrun by more people/cars/traffic/pollution. In other words, the exact opposite of what you want it to be.
I guess some people were born in the right place though, in which case you can only commend them for having worked so hard to be born there.
This doesn't follow. It's incredibly efficient, in time and effort terms, to get around sprawl. You just drive at 65mph on the wide-open freeways and up the parking lot with plenty of open space in front of every conceivable destination. I've never spent more than 30 minutes making a point-to-point hop where both points are in sprawl. Average case, more like 10. Traffic jams == not sprawl-y enough.
Thirty minutes for any public transit trip in San Francisco or Chicago (at least the parts I can afford) is like a once-a-year pop-the-champagne-corks celebration. Ten, forget it. Not gonna happen ever unless it's the corner store. Getting anywhere useful is usually abut 50 minutes. (I'm pretty sure this is the CTA's SLA. No matter the distance - past a point, roughly 50 minutes. Implies some design effort and a sophisticated balancing of slower and faster lines).
Sure, bus tickets are cheaper than car ownership, but our time is worth something too.
>just agglomerations of many towns without a center
This is precisely what the pro-density anti-car people on HN advocate: dense walkable neighborhoods, with no real solution for medium distance transportation. Tiny markets where local businesses get to price-gouge you because going to a competitor means lighting your afternoon on fire.
My time is valuable, and I spend none of it stuck in traffic or looking for parking.
Advocating for density means that more people have the option of living this way.
You've been served badly by public transit, but you seem to be saying that public transit should be as bad for everyone as it is for you.
Suppose you live in the premium housing really close to the BART, so your walk is only five minutes to the station. Then another five getting through the fare gate and waiting for your train. Then your destination is an easy ten-minute walk from the BART. Great, but that's not a 30-minute trip, it's a 50-minute trip.
Developers do what they can in the tax and legal climate they operate in. Incentives are always extremely difficult.
developers aren't to blame, zoning laws, political payoffs, and more, are to blame. Your so called bogeymen have to play by the rules set by the politicians who are concerned about reelection, post office income streams, and fame. They want to name bridges, buildings, and more, and get credit for stadiums and such. They certainly are not interested in the lives of residents until an election roles around
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....
I love thinking about this stuff, complex and fascinating :)
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.
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.
Build a bunch of three story condos out on some cheap land and you don't even need an elevator or parking garages because there's room for covered outdoor parking.
Build a high rise and you have all sorts of cost with putting something 20 stories high. Just the materials cost more. It also takes longer to break ground and build.
A good example is when someone in a rural area is outraged when the cable company says it'll cost a couple grand to wire up their house that's a ways off from any main road. Like, did you think that stuff was just free?
That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. The infrastructure you're talking about will be built by the city/state and the costs borne by everyone who lives up to the point of that condo 20 miles out.
When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right now.
Yes, agreed. And I'm not completely against socialization, but I see little reason to encourage it for this case. If infrastructure and services cost more further out, property taxes for those areas should reflect that.
> When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right now.
This tends to be true because SFH-zoned areas are held as sacred cows, and what increased density is allowed is constrained into small areas. This both keeps land prices high, so developers need to target the high end of the market, and it means that cheaper forms of increased density (say, building duplexes/triplexes/granny flats in existing low-density areas) are literally illegal.
I swear, people want developers to build huge towers and then offer up the units for cheap. Do you think it's cheap to build those towers? Hint: it is not. Brand new, inherently-expensive-to-build housing is always going to be expensive to rent. The solution is to a) permit cheaper forms of housing where possible, b) allowed increased density across a wide swathe of residential area (which can be done the same way as (a), really), and c) accept that new things always cost more than old things. The luxury units of today are the upper-middle class units of twenty years from now, the middle-class units of forty years from now, the working-units of sixty years from now, etc.
Because more people want to live there. The solution to high prices is to build more of the type of housing that people want to live in; not to build more of the type of housing that is already in low demand.
I'll pass, thank you.
Three story condo closer into town? With no parking? Sure! I'll give up my car even.
If, that is, you can get permission to build such a thing somewhere. THAT is the problem.
I suspect that building say 200 apartment units requires similar red tape whether done vertically or horizontally.
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.
This street in Chicago (http://www.iroquoistheater.com/pics/madison-street-chicago-i...) is typical of most cities of that time, be it Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo, or New York City. The effects of the automobile were only just starting to be felt.
Cities had to be walkable because apart from trolleys or horse-drawn carriages there wasn't much else in the way of options. Cycling was an option for the brave as I can only imagine how much horse crap there was in the streets back then.
Chicago has the advantage of plenty of land as opposed to New York or SF.
There are massive sprawling suburbs, but I get the impression people move there when they have kids mostly due to better schools, not being priced out or leaving for safety.
Of course, Chicago has the most murders in the US (but still about half the murder rate per capita of New Orleans or Detroit), bitterly cold winters, and far from any mountains, but nowhere is perfect (where being affordable is part of being perfect).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_W....
NW is the largest quadrant, but I'd hardly call the other quadrants "relatively empty." There are active neighborhoods and lots of development all across the city.
A lot of people would like to live in cities like SF but it's been illegal to build them since the early post war era, so there's a big supply and demand imbalance.
As in, despite Brooklyn's relatively functional nature, its density gains are counterbalanced by the suburbs of NYC on the east, north, and west.
The grandparent post implied that it's possible to have an environment that doesn't include high-rises and excessive sprawl, and I believe Brooklyn's heavy integration in the NYC metropolitan area makes it so that it doesn't satisfy this constraint -- it just moves the 'problem parts' immediately outside of its borough limits, which is kind-of how we ended up with suburban sprawl in the first place.
HTH.
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
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Madison,+WI/@43.0850975,-8...
Center city is pretty safe. So is South Street. Old City. Plenty of other neighborhoods too numerous to mention with this style of buildings. Yes, crime is relatively high in the city, but it's concentrated in certain areas (see: http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Philadelphia-Pennsylvania/...). There's a reason the Badlands is called the Badlands and Center City isn't. Judging the whole city to be unsafe by its overall crime stats is ridiculous, unfair, and misleading.
Ultimately, NIMBYism and these sorts of height restrictions are a result of the city deciding that it doesn't want new people moving in past a certain point. I won't moralize that choice, but it is certainly different than the set of choices that led to a city like New York becoming so special.
One of the biggest differences in these types of cities is parking is very limited or located underground, the buildings push very close to the streets, there's no excess road or empty front yards, and the buildings are mixed retail/residential.
Those things make for consistently more livable environments. There's no long trek across an empty parking lot and a big lawn just to get from point A to point B.
The result is it doesn't feel nearly as dense as it actually is.
This is in contrast to Hong Kong, São Paulo, and other cities that achieve density through high-rise buildings. You're intimately aware you're in a big city when you're in the built-up cores of these.
Also, I think it's very unlikely that NYC would be where it is had they restricted buildings to 5-7 stories. As it is they don't have enough density.
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.
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-c...
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.
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.