"Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work"
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Can the momentum of sprawl be halted?
It's already started. That McMansion 40 miles from town has already lost half its value since 2006. What will it be worth when gas hits $10/gallon?
Cheap energy built the sprawl; expensive energy will kill it.
But things still may not play out like OP would like. In my hometown, mom and pop businesses are still being replaced by big box chains, even in town. I never thought I'd see Home Depot, Target, & Costco 3 miles from downtown. If it's too expensive to drive to the sprawl, we'll just bring the sprawl to them.
I think there's a lot of fervent hope from a lot of people that sprawl is doomed by expensive energy, but personally I rather expect that technology will end up "saving" it in the end, a further testament to the trend towards decentralization, not erasing it.
Sure a commute 40 miles each way will increase in cost from $5.33 to $13.33. But $8 seems hardly a concern when you are wasting 1.5 hours a day driving.
Cheap energy is certainly necessary to create sprawl, but it isn't the only thing. Rather urban areas are often downtrodden in the US. Take a look at San Francisco, a pretty nice place by big city standards; compared to its suburbs, it has worse transportation infrastructure, worse schools, more congestion, more noise, more expensive, more danger, more pollution. The benefits win out in my 20s, but I sure wouldn't want to raise a family there.
Freeways in rural areas aren't that pricey. The interstate highway system cost about $500B inflation adjusted. Only about $1700/person amortized over 35 years. Or about $13M per mile.
To see how this isn't that pricey, consider the Central subway project in San Francisco which will cost $1.6B for 1.7 miles - $1900/resident
Yes, its true that most interstates are rural. Of course that is true. I'm sure that its 95% rural. That's the nature of a network that connects all of the major cities in the country. And this 95% is probably a lot less relevant to whether you decide to live in the suburbs than the much more expensive part. Of course, your edit about the cost of the SF road acknowledges this very fact.
Its also true that in dense urban areas, interstate highways make up a fraction of the roads used for commuting.
Highways that must be put through existing neighborhoods are very expensive. And that's where highways to the suburbs had to be built. Usually by forcing other people from their homes. A lot of the true costs of building roads is hidden in pollution too.
The cost to build something is not the only cost. Roads have to be maintained, snow removed and potholes filled.
All I'm saying is that growth would be much more organic and justified if those getting the benefits of sprawl paid its costs as they went, instead of receiving a subsidy that distorts things.
Everyone always says this, but nobody ever seems to consider the fact that the US is also a very very big country with tons of cheap land. Our population density is 83 people / sq. mi. Germany and the UK, on the other hand, are 593 and 660, respectively. Slightly more dense.
That's the biggest factor as to why we have sprawl IMO. As expensive as energy might get, it's still going to have to compete with the lure of cheap land...
After WWII there was pent up saving and pent up demand. People bought cracker box houses because they were cheap and way better than what they had been living in. They bought cars, because they were affordable, enabling urban sprawl.
As a kid, I lived in a farmhouse in Maine with little heat, no plumbing, no running water and cold as hell. I remember my parents drilling a well, putting in a bathroom and heat. What they and others did wasnt pretty, but in the prosperity of the times we joined the middle class.
I do share the feeling that it describes, though, about the uncaring nature of the way we seem to construct towns these days.
I do not think everybody in America thinks just like an "architecture critic". In fact I suspect most people in America, if introduced to an "architecture critic" would say "And what's that?"
If people were really upset about this, it wouldn't be happening. Alas, deep down inside, "everybody" pretty much likes what's happening.
Also with lines like this:
>We hear this unhappiness expressed in phrases like "no sense of place" and "the loss of community."
People are ALWAYS complaining about something, and usually talking about how much better something or other was (while quietly forgetting/ignoring all the problems with the previous state).
Personally I think it's a pretty rad time to be alive. Something for everyone.
In one of the pg essays, he reflects (I'm paraphrasing from memory) how it might be lamentable how everyone prefers fast food and reality TV to Mozart and Fresh produce, but you can't call it wrong. I think pg calls this 'trying to say that up is circular or down is blue' Because if that's what people prefer, it's what they prefer. The job of people contributing to society is to provide what people want, not to try and herd people into your own vision.
In a democracy, there's going to be large amounts of people who live life in a different style to your own. One of the hardest things for people as they get older is to learn to accept this and let them be. You don't have to make fun of them, or try to change them, just let them be, and ask that they leave you be as well. There are far too many people trying to boil the ocean these days and institute social changes where it isn't wanted or needed. People will adapt and change as their circumstances and tastes change. The market will follow them.
* The exurbs have fallen drastically in price compared to urban dwellings which retained most of their value in the recession. Urban dwellings in the US's biggest cities have increased dramatically in price since the article was written, even including the recent drops.
* An urban renaissance has occurred in the US, with young people and investment again flowing to city centers. (Compare NY 1996 with NY 2010 - the progress is amazing.) The culture has followed. Most sitcoms (and many movies) of the 80s occurred in the suburbs, now they are almost entirely urban.
* Many cities started promoting more-dense zoning and mass transit, helped along by mid-decade energy spikes. Some cities have stopped providing water rights to new areas to combat sprawl.
* McMansions (not even a widely used term in 1996) have gone from must-have to gauche. The Hummer, a status-symbol of the commuting class at the time, was dismantled this year after several years of terrible sales.
The point I was sort of alluding to is that right now urban life has certain undeniably advantages, along with certain undeniable disadvantages. I also suspect the advantages are still going to grow for another decade or so. But looking ahead to even some perfectly straightforward applications of trends already in development across a wide variety of fields, I see a lot of technologies emerging in 2025-2030 or so that will start bringing parity back to the "sprawl", or, to invoke a buzzword that I think actually works better, "decentralization". (I think the 2010s will come to be seen as the last dying gasp of industrial-age centralization.) Our grandchildren will be aghast at the horrors of our era of driving, for instance, not merely that we killed ourselves by the thousands for it but that it took up all our concentration for the duration. A fifteen minute drive in a rented car that automatically picks you up and doesn't drop any of your net connections for the duration, well heck that's hardly an inconvenience at all. In fact, "drive" is the wrong word, it's a ride. Better delivery systems; robotics will make practical things like grocery delivery in all but the most remote of areas. All of this automated infrastructure can work on even existing battery technology, because they remove the biggest problems with batteries which is the human issues of charge time (these can use industrial strength chargers) and the downtime of a given car is much less relevant. And so on for quite a while.
So what I see is a wave that will continue to go towards the cities, but then recede back away from the cities, but actually in some sense, drag all the good things about cities with them.
And my god, the hands that will wring as that is happening. We could probably power half the shift with the mighty power of wringing hands. Which won't do a damned thing to stop it.
I'm not sure how much of NYC's growth is related to any larger trend, or if it is simply for the last 10 years crime has dropped like crazy because the police have done a great job tackling hard problems. Anytime you see crime dropping 50%+ it is going to change who wants to live there.
Why is he even qualified to have this opinion?
The premise that buildings "nowadays" are universally cheap and inferior is stupid:
There have always been shitty buildings that don't last, because poor people also need homes.
Cheap buildings today are significantly better protection against the elements than shacks from the "good old days".
I agree with the spirit of the articles, so I guess I don't care (Yes, we should encourage people to spend more money in the building industry! Yes, hire a local artisan to make something!), but I think an economic argument is more compelling than an emotional one.
Just like all the music these days is crap (when we compare to only the best songs that we remember from 30 years ago).
I think there might be something in the idea that we did it 'better' for public buildings in the old days (Are there any buildings that cost remotely the amount of National GDP that the Pyramids or the Great Wall did?) -- But I think you're absolutely right when thinking about averages.
(Haven't read the article yet) That's probably where his mistake came from. He's judging the buildings of the past by the ones that are around now, which are (by nature of the fact that they still exist) higher quality. All of the shoddily-constructed ones are gone now. Textbook selection bias.
Surprising and eye-opening occurrence in my life: I gave up my car closing in on three years ago. Me and my two adult sons do a lot of walking locally. Walking has caught on in my neighborhood, in spite of a lack of a side-walks and huge undeveloped tracts of land and other types of discouragements. With more people walking locally, the local air is cleaner and the plant life is healthier...etc...which seems to encourage more people to walk. The neighborhood also seems to have gotten safer, this based on certain subjective impressions but also on the fact that we no longer get police cars staking out the entrance to our apartment complex, which was a routine thing when we first lived here.
Anyway, how people behave is apparently less dependent upon the built environment than I thought and that behavior is important in building the fabric of community. People know each other more now and are friendlier and the streets are safer...etc. The neighborhood has changed a good bit in the time I have been here.
Outside of parts of New York, SF, Seattle (and maybe 2 or 3 others), most urban centers are high crime dumps with the additional quality of being frighteningly expensive to live in and then completely surrounded by vast heavy industrial wastelands.
Don't get me wrong, I'd give my left leg to live in NYC at the standard of living I have in boring suburbia. But back of the envelope calculations show I'd have to make 3-7x what I make now.
At least the nice folks that built my suburb designed it with a walkable layout to a commercial town-center stocked with everything from a Gym and Movie theater to a dozen restaurants and groceries so I can pretend I live there.
Most people who write this kind of stuff really don't mean "people should live in cities"...what they really mean is "people should live in city (singular), and that city should be NYC or SF (or Seattle in some cases)".
Now, a place like San Francisco has incredible character in many of its neighborhoods. Aesthetically, it can't be beat for those qualities that make a place special. But I would wager that the vast stretches of Silicon Valley lying south of the City contain large majorities of their residents who couldn't stand city life and far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl and all. I have lived with such people for many years. They love such qualities as "safe," "quiet," "consistent" [as in quality of a neighborhood], and the like. When a Wal-Mart opens up, they are excited about the savings they will get in shopping there. And the same goes for all the other elements that we associate with "sprawl."
Now, it may be spiritually consoling to some, as it is to the author, to be able to walk past and appreciate the fine qualities of old courthouses and other custom-built buildings of the past. In a free society, however, such aesthetics are always balanced against utility and, when people have a choice, they will often choose utility. Yes, we would all love to own that old Victorian that has so much character and that sells for $3 million in a cute San Francisco neighborhood but many people don't have the luxury of being able to afford such a thing, no matter how aesthetically pleasing. For some, that little house on a busy corner of an undistinguished suburban town will have to do because this gives them an affordable home in which to live and to raise their kids. Those are the kinds of homes I and my friends all grew up in and we did not think for a moment that our souls were being deprived of what we needed or that our close circle of friends somehow lacked community just because we couldn't run with the snob crowd.
I think an article like this reflects one legitimate way of looking at life but it is a mistake to project this view on society at large. While the author's viewpoint might be seen as commendable from an idealistic perspective of how things ought to be, I would guess there are few people who consciously think this way in living their day-to-day lives. A vast number of them have lived many years in such places as "plastic city" (what San Jose has been called for years) and not given even a second thought about the alleged deadening of their souls as a result of that experience.
If and when energy prices go higher (and there are good reasons to believe they will) I think we'll see a necessary shift.
Aside #1: I think of "walkable neighborhoods" as an interesting counterpoint to "sprawl." The health benefits of living in walkable neighborhoods are well established. Aside from health, the folks at walkscore.com recently highlighted research that suggests home values retain better in walkable neighborhoods: http://blog.walkscore.com/2009/08/new-study-shows-one-point-...
Aside #2: Kunstler often makes entertaining points about the aesthetic of sprawl, be he's also a bit of an overwrought doomsayer -- I take his work with several grains of salt.
Tokyo is about as close as any city comes to accomplishing this. Aesthetics aren't the greatest, but communities, local businesses, etc. seem much stronger than in some other large cities. It's worth noting that Tokyo's population density is actually lower than New York's.
The NJ town I live in has something like 4K residents. It's almost entirely zoned residential or residential/agricultural [1], but for a tiny corner where there's a single strip mall having a Chinese restaurant, a video store, and an auto parts store.
Because the laws so thoroughly prevent non-residential uses, the people of the town have nothing to bring them together. I think this is the reason that, of my 4 neighbors, I've never met 2 of them although they've both lived there for about 2 years.
Really, the only way in my town for people to meet is when they've got children sharing classes in the schools. I don't have kids, so I'm effectively not a part of whatever community there is.
I wish that there was a nearby little grocery, or something. For practical purposes I'd like it, because I have to actually travel two towns away for anything I need to buy. But also for community purposes: if there were some place that I could bump into my neighbors occasionally, they'd be alot more like ... neighbors.
But as the article notes, this is forbidden.
[1] "Agricultural" doesn't mean a farm in this case, it means somebody who can pull off the fake farming requirement of generating >$500 of income from agricultural activities. I have one friend with a big lot that sells some firewood every year in order to lower his property tax by being agricultural.
I do empathize with his basic point about sprawl - I don't enjoy driving and neither does my wife, so the fact that San Francisco has fairly decent public transit and is generally walkable is a big plus. We'd have to make a lot of adjustments if I moved to a suburb, and Mrs. Browl (who grew up in SF) likes being near a high-density urban environment. It's an awesome city, and the rich architectural and cultural heritage play a big part in that. I also like that there are a lot of skyscrapers, because when I was growing up in Europe they were something I saw only in movies :-)
However, you're quite right that the economics of it don't make sense for most people. We've been looking for a house over the last year and staying inside the SF city limit comes at enormous cost. Besides the up-front expense, another city problem is the relatively poor quality of the available choices. San Francisco buildings are either old (expensive to maintain, quirky) or if new, very expensive and either tiny, badly constructed, or both. Coming from a slightly cooler area in Europe, it astonishes me that such a wealthy city is full of houses with such cheap windows and building materials. When my parents visited us earlier this year the very first thing my mother asked about on the way in from the airport was why so many of the houses looked like they were built out of cheap wood. Every place I've ever lived in Europe feels like a bomb shelter by comparison; indeed, visiting some friends who bought a 5-year old suburban house a couple of hours' drive from SF gives me major house envy. It's not going to win any design awards, but the house is large, well constructed, fairly efficient, and the community it's in is nice. The same money in SF will buy only an undersized firetrap in a chronically dysfunctional neighborhood - on paper it seems like a good investment, in reality anything but.
The sad fact is that land prices dominate all else here, and so most of us live in terrible buildings, which are shockingly bad value for money. I've been in some very, very expensive homes here that are still terrible; the people who built them would probably be shaking their heads at our failure to capitalize on a century of architectural and other knowledge in regard to most of our own dwelling conditions. We have some wonderful, historic civic architecture, and some fantastic commercial buildings (in a few places, both at once), but apart from a few genuinely unique/historical neighborhoods most of the city would be better torn down and rebuilt with a minimum of 6 floors, which might allow sensible use of the space at ground level. Sad to say, I think it's going to take a large earthquake to get everyone back on the same page and recalibrate perceptions about the long-term development of the city.
(It's not all gloom and doom - there's 2 or maybe 3 huge redevelopment projects taking place over the next decade, on Treasure Island, Hunter's Point, and maybe the old Port district. But for smaller development projects, the planning/review process is a nightmare beyond parody.)
It's weird; on the one hand I have a great quality of life, one which epitomizes a great deal of what is cool about a world city like San Francisco: if my 20 or 30 year old self took a time machine into the present, he/I would be amazed at how lucky I am. On the other hand, I keep daydreaming about moving to...Sacramento. It's cheap, it's pleasant, it's small enough to get around on foot or by bicycle. Immediate proximity to the fount/drain of state government also make for a more interesting environment than most people suspect.
I'm curious: why isn't it? On the face of it, this sounds like a great opportunity for some investors to make a lot of money. Buy some land in SF, rebuild with taller, better-constructed buildings, and then collect the increased rent money. Is there some Kafka-style government bureaucracy prohibiting this, or weird tax disincentives?
Any large building requires several million and several years before it can even break ground; last year a developer who had already dug a foundation ended up filling it in again and selling the land after a 3-year delay. Also environmental law is used obstructively in a great many cases. I'm generally in favor of public consultation, regulations etc., but sometimes the big projects suck up all the political oxygen and that makes it harder for smaller developers to move forward. The recession hasn't helped either of course.
I'm not in real estate or anything, just a bit bummed that our city government hasn't been running well in recent years.
Houses in California are going to look less "solid" than houses elsewhere because houses elsewhere are often built out of brick or stone, materials that are vastly more likely to fail in an earthquake. Wood-frame, wood- or stucco-sided homes are common in California because they are much more likely to withstand earthquakes.
To add my own point, I am sure that house prices in San Francisco are high because of high demand and limited supply, not because they are intrinsically more expensive to create.
"contain large majorities of their residents who couldn't stand city life and far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl and all"
but you can not combine it with this:
"In a free society, however, such aesthetics are always balanced against utility and, when people have a choice, they will often choose utility."
Suburbs require gigantic subsidies to be made to work, so you need to be careful how you use the phrase "free society". Because the population is relatively sparse in the suburbs (compared to a dense city), the cost of procurement of infrastructure tends to go up on a per capita basis. Just think of the energy loss carrying electricity, kilometer after kilometer, in the suburbs, and compare that to carrying the same amount of energy in the city, where the power does not need to travel as much of a distance (per capita). For any given 100,000 people a dense city allows the cheaper availability of roads and sewers and power and transport. Such density is economically rational.
Think carefully about some of the things that people love most about the suburbs. One thing people love is the wide open spaces, and the lack of crowds (especially compared to a dense urban core). And yet, the crowds in the city are usually economically rational, especially compared to the expense of provisioning the suburbs. Think about the wide open highways of Texas - "wide open" means "used less than a road in New York City" and the greater use that the road gets in New York City means the money spent on it is more wisely spent.
The suburbs need to be seen as a luxury item. Since the USA is wealthy, it can afford many luxuries, and the suburbs are one of them. But the suburbs are more luxurious than the cities, and the cities are more economically rational.
And of course, in the suburbs, one has to use a car to get anywhere. This is, of course, a tremendous use of resources, on a per capita basis. In a dense urban core, such as New York City, you can travel by mass transit, which uses less resources per capita. And you can even travel by foot or by bicycle. The suburbs depend on the use of automobiles, and automobiles, too, need to be seen as luxury items. Again, because the USA is wealthy, it can afford many luxuries, but again, the heavy dependence on the automobiles makes the life in the suburbs more resource intensive, per capita, than life in the city.
Where you use the phrase "free society" I would prefer the use of the phrase "subsidized society".
Where you use the word "utility" I would use the word "subsidy." And yes, of course, everyone would like to live in a heavily subsidized society, so long as you can get the subsidies from someone else.
I suspect that anyone wanting to downvote my comment is someone who themselves lives in the suburbs, and they are downvoting my comment because my post makes them uncomfortable. But just because an idea makes you uncomfortable doesn't make it untrue. My point is entirely valid, and it is correct.
In a dense core, maintenance and development are vastly much costlier than in the suburbs Acquiring land for any project is going to be harder and pricier. If you close a road in a suburb to do work on it or do other construction, no big deal; in a city, you create horrible traffic problems. Politically you have to deal with 3-4x as many people per mile work of anything in a city. In an urban environment, sure fuel costs per person drop drastically, but when other costs are taken into account, I remain unconvinced it is so much cheaper. Just look how expensive it is to live in a big city in the US relative to a suburb.
PER CAPITA
You write:
"Acquiring land for any project is going to be harder and pricier. "
Yes, obviously. Of course the land is pricier in the big urban cities. This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
The resources used PER CAPITA in suburbs will be greater than the resources used PER CAPITA in a dense urban core, other things being equal. This is a simple matter of space and resource use. Resources will tend to be more heavily used in a dense urban core, therefore society gains more benefit from that those resources, assuming the point of the resource is to be used.
Compare the use of fuel in the city, and fuel in suburbs. Much fuel in the suburb is spent on automobiles, which are well known to be inefficient. In a city you will have mass transit, which offers a more efficient use of fuel, per capita.
You write:
"In an urban environment, sure fuel costs per person drop drastically, but when other costs are taken into account, I remain unconvinced it is so much cheaper."
Nowhere did I say the city was cheaper than the suburbs. I suggest the opposite - the suburbs are cheaper than the cities. And I suggest the reason why - it is because the suburbs are subsidized to a greater extent than the cities.
There is a large literature on this subject in the field of urban planning.
You can claim that in a city people will have mass transit available, but with only a few exceptions in the US that mass transit is underutilized and really only serves to get a small fraction of the urban residents to work and back; it does not serve other daily needs quite as well, so after taking mass transit back from work you will hop into your car to go get groceries or go out for some entertainment in the evening.
If these magical subsidies truly existed at the level you are suggesting they would be both obvious and a source of growing political friction given the re-urbanization of the American population. Could you point out some examples of these subsidies? [And before you start, "fuel" does not really count since it cuts both ways in this argument and urban residents to not lead significantly more fuel efficient lives than their suburban counterparts.]
Err... He capitalized "PER CAPITA".
In cities, a piece of land the size of 6 suburban homes (counting backyard) can be home to several thousand people, that's why land is expensive.
Go to Hong Kong, you'll see apartment buildings with 40 floors. On each floor there are 20 units. In each unit there are 2 rooms, a living room, a kitchen and a toilet. Each room is 2.5 metres by 2.5 metres, the living room 3 times that. Anywhere from 2 to 6 people can live in a single unit, but usually 4; The government doesn't hand out public housing with 2 rooms to only 2 people. 4 * 20 * 40 is over 3200 residents.
In the suburbs the same land is home to only around two dozen people. Thus it would make sense that in Hong Kong land could be a hundred times more expensive than in a suburb anywhere else.
A plot of land can only be home to several thousand people if you are willing to pay a lot of money to build it in that fashion. Building up is not a cost saving measure, it is a demand placed upon a plot of land as a consequence of population density. Building suburban homes for several thousand people will occupy more land than a dense urban apartment tower, but it will be an order of magnitude cheaper to build in the first place.
"Building up is not a cost saving measure"
There has been a consistent misreading in this thread, focusing on cost. My focus was not on cost, but on resource use. Nowhere did I suggest that cities were cheaper than the suburbs. I stated above that building in a city is pricier than building in the suburbs.
However, my point was, the suburbs use more resources. The biggest resource that is used in the suburbs is land. Per capita, the suburbs use up much more land than the cities do. The geographical dispersion leads to more resource use in the suburbs.
Consider electricity being carried over a wire. Some energy is lost for every kilometer the energy needs to be carried. In a city, you might have 100,000 people living in just a few blocks - the energy does not need to travel far, per capita. In the suburbs, the same 100,000 people might be spread out over many kilometers.
I have not mentioned the environmental impact, but we could discuss that too. The suburbs use up a lot of land. The suburbs have a major impact on forests and lakes and rivers, and the wildlife that depends on those forests and lakes and rivers.
It might help to engage in a thought experiment about how much land you could free up if all people clumped together in an urban area as dense as New York City. In the USA, the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts have a combined population a little over 9 million. New York City has a population a bit more than 8 million. Basically, if you wanted to pack all these people into another New York, you would have a city smaller than Massachusetts, and Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire would be pure, untouched, pristine forest. Mind you, I am not suggesting this is a practical idea, I'm simply offering this as a thought experiment, as a way of imagining some of the environmental benefits of density.
1) It feels like you are exaggerating population densities. Outside of some ultra high density areas in Manhattan, you aren't going to have 100,000 people in a few blocks. The density of most cities is about 3 to 4x that of suburbs, not orders of magnitude greater. (Note: I'm going off Bay Area data here).
2) Agreed on environmental costs not being accounted for. Developing suburbs would cost more if they were; how much I can't say.
3) On your thought experiment, here's something to think about: The entire world's population can fit in Texas (270,000 sq miles) at density levels found in SF neighborhoods. You'd need just over 3 Texases (or a Texas + Alaska) to do suburban density levels (~900,000 sq miles). But you would need about 19+ million sq miles for farming (russia + canada + us + china + brazil); in other words, the land use savings gained from going fully urban is a rounding error.
3a) On top of that, you already have to build out roads, wires, etc. to get to the farmland. When also given that the land everywhere can absorb some waste with little effect (septic tanks), it actually is efficient to spread the population more evenly throughout this hypothetical world.
4) Again the cost does matter. The interstate highway system has a lower cost per person and higher average utilization per person (defined as US residents) than San Francisco's Central subway does per person (SF residents). Ongoing maintenance still looks the same; San Francisco needs to spend about $51M a year on road maintenance. Sunnyvale is at $4.7M with a 6th of the population and a 3rd the density. There might be some resources saved in higher density, but something is dragging the per capita costs higher in highly dense areas.
"Yes, resource usage may be greater per capita in the suburbs, but the most expensive resource in most cases is space/land and it is very, very expensive in urban cores."
As I have said repeatedly, my focus was not on cost but on resource use. Cities use land more efficiently than suburbs. Nowhere did I say that cities were cheaper than the suburbs. I said that the cities were pricier than the suburbs. The cost and the resource use are 2 different things. In fact, you could argue that land in a city is more expensive precisely because the land is being used more efficiently.
Per capita, a city uses less land than the suburbs. This is almost definitional. A city is efficient in its use of land. Land is an important resource. This is an example of how cities are more efficient in their use of resources.
On the flip side, low density towns require more asphalt per capita and more day-to-day gasoline usage.
Overall though, it's not on the face of it obvious to me that low density is more resource intensive. I'd be interested if you have links to detailed research on the matter.
It's also not obvious to me that small towns are more subsidized. Bridges, highways, subways, etc, going into a city are all government funded. And cities like Washington D.C. and New York are basically imperial cities - they make most of their income from politically connected agencies, banks, contractors, etc.
"Many low density towns get away without a sewer system, houses can use a septic system instead."
A septic system still uses resources. In fact, per capita, a septic system is one of the most wasteful kinds of systems for handling sewage. Think of the land that a septic system needs.
Yes, think of the land, specifically the marginal cost of using said land for a septic system.
A septic system in the country can easily cost less than the comparable amount of NYC's sewer system.
True, but the question is not resources used, but cost of resources and the value of the benefits received.
Energy wise, the people in the city use far less. But that is mostly becuase they have smaller apartments and use less heat. Give everyone in the suburbs 800 sq ft and then run the comparison again.
You definition of "resource" is a little strange. Would the pebbles in the asphalt on a street in NYC see more tires run over them per year than the pebbles in the asphalt in the suburbs. Probably true. When you look at the cost of maitaining a mile of road in NYC and compare it to a mile of road in the suburbs, the difference is striking. You are spending 10x+ for everything in the city because it is a logistics nightmare.
Even something as simple as a dedicated fiber line for a business, in the suburbs they can just run a line underground easily. In the city, it is a major problem becuase everything underground is already filled, so it comes down to getting a permit to run a line through the underground manholes (an existing, and very limited, resource) and it can be difficult if not impossible.
Not to mention compare a house made of 2x4s, plywood, to one made of steel and brick. Wood grows back. Steel doesn't. Steel also uses an insane amount of energy. And construction in the city is very time consuming, energy consuming, and expensive.
I'm not going to waste the time dissecting it in detail, but your comment is full of not-quite-sensical comparisons ("[S]ubsidized society" vs. "free society"? Intercity highways are "unwise"--where do cities get food?) and provocative language ("Suburbs require gigantic subsidies"--so do cities, right, even if smaller per capita? Suburbs are "luxuries"?).
I think that you're confusing "costs more" with "is subsidized".
> Such density is economically rational.
Ah yes, another cost-benefit analysis that ignores benefits.
Here's another one.
Going to Fiji to scuba dive is economically stupid because travel from San Jose to Fiji costs money.
Whether going to Fiji to dive is economically stupid depends on the price, and the relevant prices are different for different people.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
Our culture no longer cares about us. It exists only to fuel "economic growth".
I'm sorry if this seems reactionary or trollish. It is my true belief.
What he's describing the headache that comes with being an urban 'pioneer'.
I'll also take exception with gems like:
Nobody lays in their bed in Plano and hears gunshots half a mile away.
Except that they do. I still own a house in Plano (in the most suburban 'safest' part), and in the year in a half that we lived there (2005-2007) we:
* had a neighbor (3 houses down) forced at gunpoint back into their house, tied up, and robbed blind. All happened in broad daylight.
* had a gun-fight in the parking lot across the street from our development
* had multiple muggings and car-jackings all within close proximity of our house.
And in such a young, rapidly expanding country, a far smaller percentage of the buildings are old, even if every one of them had survived.
I wonder how the author can say this with a straight face. The only way to prevent clumping into income groups is through the dystopian planning law - which he claims elsewhere to criticise.
If people see cheap housing near where they're friends live, they'll buy it and convert it, and it becomes expensive housing.
I don't think that we can or should try to totally eliminate the variations in income among neighborhoods, but we can stop passing laws that make it worse.
Where I was living earlier this year was near Guildford, in Perth, Australia. Not far away is the old Midland Rail Yard. The site is dominated by three giant industrial sheds built for rail engine maintenance. Internally they look much like any 1900s factory, with brute thick walls to support fixed cranes and fantastic natural light from 2-story wall windows and sawtooth roof windows.
Outside the brickwork is formed into lovely arches with tasteful adornments. All in all these utterly functional buildings are beautiful.
(Only half-decent photo I could find online: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sengster/134135743/in/photostre...)
Today you could not justify the cost. Brickwork of that kind takes too long and so costs serious money; windows like those allow too much heat in. So instead we get lego buildings, giant concrete cubes without soul or feeling.
Where the money is spent these days is no longer on craftsmanship, it's on wanktastic monuments to some puffed up architect's desire to win an architecture award. Go find a building in your city that has won any such award since the 60s. Dollars to donuts it is ugly and impractical.
Steve Blank wrote an article http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-darkest-men-see-th... on why the traditional barriers of entry for businesses, particularly Internet-based businesses, are -simultaneously- falling down ... at the same time that a large number of recent-collage grads are entering the workforce in the middle of recession, with the real estate market still crashing around us. It means that not only is it easier to start your own business, many people are forced to.
Indeed, http://www.fastcompany.com/1707431/the-rise-of-the-homeprene... talks about the "homepreneurs", having home-based business.
One interesting thing reading this and reading the interviews in Founders At Work was that many of the tech founds then and the founds now say that it is much more acceptable now to operate a business from the home than it was say, in 1980. The idea of a garage-based business in Palo Alto is the stuff of legends, but the reality was that in mind 1970s, 1980s, even the early 1990s, you don't get as much credibility with a home-based business. With the number of big IPOs and "rags-to-riches" stories, garage-based businesses are more acceptable. So is the fact that people can rent Class-A digs to woo customers and investors.
But think about this in the context of that Atlantic article. The article talks about how the traditional mixed-use neighborhoods wove residential with commercial concerns. Someone living in a traditional neighborhood could get all of their basic living needs by walking, all within a 5 minute walk.
In other words, it -seems- that a "home-based" business is more acceptable in the present than in the past, but dig deeper into a past when towns were planned around neighborhoods instead of zones, and you see this is actually an American tradition.
What's different now is that the barriers of entry are falling particularly for web-based businesses. People outside of IT -- and even inside IT -- don't know this, but virtualization has changed the game since 2005. In late 1990s, the cost for setting up your server and a landline was in the tens of thousands. In 2005, it has dropped into the thousands, and probably less. With virtualization now, we're talking about ~$10/mth for base cost; expert labor costs much more than the servers themselves.
Even product-based businesses operate virtually now, as described in Tim Ferris's Four Hour Workweek. Product fulfillment can be outsourced to competent firms. So are product design and marketing. Just-in-time inventory has made its way to small businesses, so there isn't a need to warehouse inventory yourself.
My point is that the numbers of people with a non-traditional job -- that is, unless you look all the past 1920s when it was traditional to own your own business -- can fly under the radar of zoning laws. And further, there will be an increasing demand and pressure for traditionally-planned, neighborhood-based communities. I don't think homepreneurs want to live in surburbia. I have friends who drive out to the local coffee shop, to get their socialization while "working from home". And if that coffee shop was instead a pleasant, 5-minute walk away?