Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy
vox.com
vox.com
It's interesting how the standards of living differ between us. It seems to me that a lot of people crave a suburbian house in the US. I'd love to live there for a while to get a feel of the society and why it thinks in this way.
There's a TED talk I stumbled upon some time ago - only 5mins but perfectly approaches part of the problem we are discussing here ;) "How to reinvent the apartment building" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-KnaYZJg48
If you want to compare to a similar city in the US look at Portland, Oregon. The city proper has 500k ~ 600k (~2.5m if you count the 'metro area' -- for comparison Toronto Canada has ~2.7m people in the city proper).
Straight roads, boring 'architecture', giant parking lots between the sidewalk and the retail buildings.
Compare Atherton, UK - nice, homely "typical UK" town with busy high-street.
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.523623,-2.491372,3a,75y,92.9...
Now, San Jose, CA, USA suburbia: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.323192,-121.972195,3a,75y,25...
Boring. Thankfully planners seem to have recognized this, and now the trend is to build high-density housing, and right out to the street.
James Howard Kunstler has a FANTASTIC Ted talk about this subject, which cracks me up every time. Highly recommended:
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
The two inner cores are pedestrian dreams, for obvious historic reasons, but automotive nightmares. The wealthier parts of town tend to be in these inner cores, and the low-end workers tend to live in the outskirts.
The outskirts areas of European cities are generally pretty abysmal by American standards. Unkempt, graffiti-filled, feel dangerous. This is where all the train yards are. They remind an American of what we call "inner-city" projects, only they surround their home city.
Because of the income levels that live there, and being tightly wrapped around the more prosperous inner cores, they are however, better informed by the pedestrian friendly natures of those inner cores. So they usually have great integrated bus service and passable mass-transit (if the city has it).
The reasons for this outer ring are numerous, but it's usually a mix of rapid construction after the war (people needed houses, FAST), mid-century social experiments (public housing projects), and the inertia created by those two things.
What's outside this ring? Generally farmland, dotted with small towns and villages. I've never seen density drop off in the states as quickly as I do in Europe. You're in a city and then you're immediately in the countryside -- there's very little transition. It's not true everywhere in Europe. But it's fairly consistent.
Cities in Europe are also pretty close, Glasgow to Edinburgh is ~1hr driving. Glasgow to Manchester is ~3.5hrs, to London in 6.5, and Paris in 11. If they weren't so close, inter-city transport would be unbearable. But because they're so close, national rail ends up working like commuter rail and you can hop a train from Glasgow to London in 4 hours.
Heck, Glasgow to Kiev is 31 hours, or about 4 days of driving.
Or here's a trip I did once in Ireland. Dublin to Belfast to Dublin to Galway. It crosses the entire country a couple time and the whole thing takes around 6 hours.
Here's a comparison of Scotland vs. a state in the U.S., Virginia. https://mapfight.appspot.com/scotland-vs-us.va/scotland-virg...
Virginia has 3 major urban areas, the North (near Washington D.C.), the Capital at Richmond, and the South Eastern Coast around Norfolk.
The North of Virginia is a bit like London, a continuous conglomeration of several adjacent areas and small towns and cities. It has about 3 million people in it, but it's worth looking at a piece at a time:
Arlington, VA has about the density of Glasgow, has several interesting neighborhoods, is highly walkable, has subway service, buses, is bikable.
A walk from Celtic Park to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow will take you about 1.5hrs. While a similar length walk in Arlington from the Potomac Overlook Park to the National Cemetery takes you about 1.5 hrs. Here's what the core looks like from the air (the circles are areas around the subway stations) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Arlingto...
It only has about 1/3 of the population of Glasgow, but most purposes it's a fair approximation of a place like Glasgow in the U.S. If you figure in Neighboring Alexandria, VA (also part of the North), you get even closer to an American Glasgow. It's every bit as reasonable a place as most European cities.
But Arlington and Alexandria aren't particularly important areas in the U.S. They're just parts of the Washington D.C. metro area, which has around 6 million people, the 7th largest in the U.S.
Now drive 2 hours South to Richmond, which by American standards is old, founded in 1737 (before the U.S. existed!) And even though it's half the density of Arlington and Glasgow, is still highly walkable in most of the city. It doesn't have a subway, but it has extensive bus service, a major university, government buildings, etc. It feels like a small European city in those ways.
Go 2 hours East and you end up in Norfolk, which is basically a conglomeration of military bases and ship builders. With about as much thought put into city planning as that sounds. It's not very walkable, suffers from all of the criticisms ever levied against American cities, requires a car to get around etc.
Now what's in the rest of the state? Farmland, small towns, villages. But Virginia doesn't have to rely on Virginia for farming. There's a million square miles in the middle of the U.S. that do nothing but grow food, and most of that land sits unused, and unfarmed.
So most of Virginia's farmland is nonproductive. It sits there unused and non-productive. So what do you do with a bunch of cheap land that's only costing farmers money? You sell it, chop it up and offer houses to people who want to raise families outside of a city, but don't want to live in the isolation of the wilds. You create suburbs.
So 2 out of 3 ain't bad. I've just described 2 minor American urban areas that are as reasonable as most places in Europe. You can even take a train between them.
Suburbs are not a uniquely American thing. As European agricultural productivity and economic integration has increased, American style suburbs are also becoming popular in Europe.
Here's Glasgow again
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uddingston,+Glasgow,+Glasg...
and a listing
http://www.s1homes.com/Houses-for-sale/2015031712003303.shtm...
Even the architecture looks like an American suburb!
The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans.
So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise would not exists, and more infrastructure is built. Which in turn bring more people to live there, which in turn brings more local jobs (i.e. mom-n-pop AC/plumbing/electric company, Homedepot, etc)
And built roads are not quite wasteful too - as far as I know roads drive economy, not subdue it.
More typically, the tax districts for the areas with McMansions are entirely separate from those with a high concentration of apartments and urban housing. In this situation, the residents in a particular area bear the tax burden for the services that they consume. My particular metropolitan area is divided into several "cities" (I put it in quotes because they really all run together) that serve to ensure that each area's residents bear the cost of their services. Even in this situation, due to taxes levied by the state government, the flow of capital still tends to go from the suburbs to the urban areas.
In fact, I suspect that most house dwellers would be hugely in favor of further segregating the tax system so that funds paid by a group of individuals are used for services desired by that same group. In my area this would, however, result in the defunding of most public transportation (which is largely financed by people who do not use it), urban schools, the community college (which is funded by the whole county, but mostly used by lower income residents), etc. As an example, the public bus system recently appropriated lanes on many busy streets that were paid for by gas taxes. Since those with longer commutes pay more in gas tax, it stands to reason that these lanes were originally paid for by suburban commuters, and are now being used by the apartment dwellers and urban residents who are the primary clientele of the bus system (use fees make up only a small part of the funding for public transit in my area).
I am not stating that the existence of any of these things is bad, but simply that your belief that apartment dwellers are subsidizing the lives of McMansion residents is entirely incorrect.
This way "most families living in a half million dollar McMansions" get their own road-heavy city budget, and a "typical apartment dweller" gets his parks/libraries/schools/transportation fix.
That's a grand theory, of course. In reality, outside of a few cities, most American urban downtowns are proverbial dumps.
https://www.google.com.au/url?q=http://newclimateeconomy.rep...
All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.
For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.
That is the point of the article.
Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."
If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
edit: though living in an apartment will be more expensive, so that wasn't a great example.
Like with everything, there must be a balance (we need scientific research,) but having suburbia and infrasture is not automatically bad in my opinion.
Except for the massive externalities involved, sure, they're willing to pay for it. Urban dwellers largely subsidize your suburbia, and have since its inception.
Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.
> Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?
Don't think it's that absolute.
Think about tax dollars collected from a given square mile vs tax dollars spent on a given square mile. Suburbs tend to decrease the former and increase the latter, high-density projects tend to move the money in the opposite direction.
We made long-time friends with a family a mile away by road, but I could get there in a quarter of a mile or so by woods and swamp. The trick to walking through the swamp was to try to step on clumps of grass sticking out of the muck. I would come across rotting tree trunks and knock them over to watch the termites. Sometimes our outdoors cats would join me and follow from a distance.
My dad drove 30 minutes to work, about 25 miles away, where he struggled to run a discount auto-parts distributorship employing too many people to be profitable. My mom stayed at home with me and my little brother.
My friends loved coming over. If we walked far enough past the swamp, we would be on the bay, which smelled kind of funky for being fresh-water, too far from the sea water to be even brackish though. It was just us, and maybe our neighbors who mostly stayed indoors. We didn't worry about break-ins. We left our door open a lot.
I currently pay a lot of money for a doorman for that kind of sense of security in NYC. As for being able to walk in the woods by myself, that's just about impossible, and you can't put a price tag on it. Unless I'm home alone, there's almost always someone in my field of view. I'm kind-of used to it, but a lot of people have a visceral distaste for it. Seems like I can't even get to work without getting into a subway car that smells like something died in it.
An economist might not have a direct way to measure the value we created for ourselves, but you might say we created a lot of value for ourselves by living where we did.
This type of counterintuitive behavior only occurs because we live in an era where oil is dirt cheap. This is the only time in human history where living farther away from the city is actually cheaper then living closer to it. Before the advent of the automobile, urban infrastructure centered around walkable cities as you will see throughout Europe. One day, as we start running out of oil, the suburbs will become the new ghettos.
That is not in the slightest true. Your thing about oil is a red herring.
Urban areas (farms back then) were ALWAYS cheaper than cities.
Perhaps this statement is more clear: Due to cheap oil this is the only time in history where living outside the city and driving miles and miles to work everyday is cheaper then living in the city right next to work.
then you can separate the source of energy from the consumer of energy.
I think suburban living is generally going to be less time-consuming than urban living unless you're doing something dumb, like communting into Los Angles or Washington, D.C.
There are times where the diversity of a city would be great, but I don't like the noise, traffic, or public transportation.
In the bay area, BART is ok, Caltrain isn't bad, but Muni? Oy.
Just coming back from a business trip to Tokyo (my first time here), I can see how public transport can be very efficient. That said, even here, I got to over hear some google employees whining about their offices being moved to an area that was mostly business park and not wanting to commute.
No matter where you choose to live, there are personal choices that are part of the calculus.
I can, on the other hand, speak to suburban living being as alienating as anything I've ever encountered. Sitting in a car, alone, for an hour a day to go to and from work--time I couldn't spend doing anything of use, be it reading or working or talking to a friend--was the most soul-killing time of my life.
However if living space isn't as a big of an issue, there is definitely a sweet spot where you can find smaller spaces that make living in the city cheaper then suburban life.
One time inner city ghettos like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights are gradually being gentrified into middle class neighborhoods. Property values are even rising in what were once the most entrenched slums, like East New York.
Meanwhile, the inner suburbs are beginning to decay as middle class professionals no longer move there to raise families. Low income residents displaced from the inner city are being pushed into these areas where rent is low - but still not saving money because they have to buy a car and pay for gas just to get groceries, and if they take transit to work it's now the 3-10x more expensive commuter rail rather than the affordable subway.
The outer suburbs where McMansions dominate are still thriving, but a few years ago I drove around the middle ring suburb where my dad grew up. In his childhood and even in mine it had been a solidly middle class Levittown clone. Tidy homes and yards, well-kept strip malls, and all. Now it's a textbook example of suburban decay. Entire blocks of houses that desperately need paint jobs and repairs. Deserted parking lots in strip malls with half the storefronts empty and the pavement cracked so badly a small child could get lost in the gaps. Independent businesses boarded up. Old people pushing grocery carts along nearly deserted sidewalks -- probably two or three miles each way to the supermarket. Not a pretty sight.
You see the same in Detroit, among other places. A suburb populated by wealthy or even middle class taxpayers can afford to keep up the infrastructure and economic engine to make it a pleasant place to live. One populated by low income people can't -- it soon becomes unlivable. That's going to be a conundrum for us to solve in this century. I hope we address it by building upwards and expanding public transit to make city-style living affordable again for everyone (which would also be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars than repaving thousands of miles of roads and keeping up sprawling electric and water/sewer lines in suburbs where people wouldn't live if they could afford the city), but fear we haven't the political will to do so.
Because the "real" solution is for every single person to own and drive a car that seats 4, but 99% of the time only has 1 person in it?
But do they take public transportation? Or do they use a car service?
They're paying to avoid public transportation exactly like the OP said.
John Paulson, architect of the largest trade in Wall Street history, takes public transit to work every day.
This particular story is about surburban sprawl, which means that anything happening in SF, NYC, DC, or Boston is completely irrelevant.
Mostly it's that I work downtown and chose to buy my condo in a neighbourhood with good transit. As a result, driving would "save" me 5 to 10 minutes but require 300$/month parking spot to actually save any time.
If I worked out in an industrial park (where my employer also has an office) driving would be a no-brainer however. Parking out there is free and transit is annoying (bus every 15-30 minutes during rush hour only, multiple connections.) At that office, from my house driving saves 10-15 minutes of commute during rush hour and 15-45 minutes outside of it. In extreme cases (our support staff working the graveyard shift) driving saves 2+ hours or a very expensive taxi ride.
There are a number of factors at play here. To pretend that just because people act a certain way that the decision is based in fact and logic ignores reality.
People don't use public transit because:
1. They don't want to mingle with the "lower classes."
2. Driving a car for a long time was a status symbol. It's less of a status symbol today, but the effects of this are still embedded in American culture. Those "with money" can afford a car. If you take transit, then you are "poor."
So if you take transit you are signalling to others that you are "poor." Or you are afraid that you might have to sit across from someone that is "poor" and that would make you feel uncomfortable.
3. Buying a car for a long time was also "supporting America" (cue people chanting 'USA! USA!') because you were supporting the Big 3.
4. People get annoyed at having to wait for things like the bus. Even of the bus runs every 10 minutes, the fact that you might have to wait 10 minutes for something is enough for people to get upset about it.
Which is my whole point: we should find out what the actual basis for their decision is, and take it into consideration.
But it's much more fun to adopt an air of superiority on HN as you settle into your comfy seat on the bus to the Facebook campus, where your worst immediate problem is that your attractive and personable seatmate has spilled a bit of his latte on your armrest. This is not most peoples' lives, but you'd never know it from reading all of the "B... b... but SF!" comments in these threads.
The article is also a little thin without concrete examples. Looking at other countries, parts of Japan are almost completely connected but this somehow works with the large amount of natural resources they have while also supporting a huge population. Economic measures have to look at more than just the monetary value of things. I know this looks at social and environmental factors, but there are network effects to consider too.
Chicago also has, for the most part, segregated neighborhoods for work and living. If you're wealthy, you can afford to live within walking distance of white collar jobs, if not you're stuck.
Also, Chicago is a bit of an abnormality in the US for paying some attention to cycling infrastructure.
It's not just the airports. My wife works at ANL. There are exactly two buses a day which go from our place to the lab. And this is after a ten minute walk. If you miss those, you either have to drive or take a taxi. There are no other options whatsoever.
Maybe public transport works well in the city, but good luck surviving in the suburbs without a car.
I live in a suburb and recently spent a large amount of time looking for a new job, after living in a small part of California with limited opportunities, and while I didn't have the best time looking for a position as a Software Engineer, it's not as if there weren't jobs in any suburb or downtown that I couldn't achieve. I'm not someone who would look to regularly commute downtown but there are both Metra and L-stations that I could access and it's not as if we don't have roads.
This sort of sprawl as an issue seems to be targeted towards growing cities and suburbs that are undeveloped in terms of resources and infrastructure. Many of Chicago's suburbs and surrounding areas have really deep histories and local roots. In this sense they become their own neighborhoods, cities, towns, and villages instead of just rows of houses without sidewalks or an endless stretch of strip malls.
I think it's also easy to carpool or work around bus schedules if that's really an issue to a commute, or buying an electric car for short journeys like that.
The second city is also in a much better position than many other cities in the midwest. Indianapolis and Minneapolis-St. Paul are a lot harder to get around from outside the city, especially if you don't have a car, so I could understand how moving further and further out could be a detriment.
The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
We have a perfect (pathetic) example of this phenomenon.
Most of the older buildings in the downtown core rest along brickpave streets that are awful to drive on. Horrible for the suspension, tires, the works. I believe the insistence on keeping them is an attempt to limit through traffic from a nearby East/West interchange with the notorious Interstate-4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_4#Orlando_area).
Through traffic is still a huge issue, and in addition, the poor brickpave road is constantly riddled with pot holes from the heavy trucks and sheer number of vehicles that detour through. I can't imagine what the maintenance must cost relative to regular asphalt.
Ha, no way. If it's the worst place you've been to, then I can only imagine you have not been to many places. Admittedly it lacks good mass transit, but that's true of most of California (I personally would say all, because SF mass transit isn't great either, it just happens to make the rest of California look barbaric - I say this as a proud Californian). And the car culture is especially strong in SoCal. Not to mention Irvine was originally intended to be a suburban community, not a metropolis. A measure was put forth to add light rail a few years ago, but the "not in my backyard" folks voted it down.
It has 8 lane surface streets precisely because of forethought (it's a planned city, btw). Most of the north-south roads have 65 mph speed limits. You don't get that without proper planning and zoning. It operates its own shuttle service independent of the county. Then there's the high ratio of parks, green belts, wildlife reserves, and dedicated bike lanes relative to its neighbors. Demand to live there is outstripping supply, which leads to traffic, which admittedly sucks and hopefully Californians will realize you can't keep throwing more lanes at the problem. I'm in Manhattan now, and sure, Irvine can seem like a quaint provincial town in comparison, but the worst place you've ever been to? Horribly designed? Cue eye-rolling.