New Geography

Category: planning

  • New Urbanism, Smart Growth, & Andres Duany: A Critique From Suburbia

    In 1998 Hollywood introduced us to a new star when it released The Truman Show, shot on location at Seaside in Florida. No I’m not talking about Jim Carrey, Laura Linney or Ed Harris. I’m talking about none other than Andres Duany.

    A few months ago, I stayed at the magnificent WaterColor Inn, which is in the neighborhood adjacent to Seaside. Watercolor is closer in feel to a suburban development’s sense of space (more open), but WaterColor’s Town Center doesn’t offer a large choice of restaurants, so Seaside serves as a destination. Other than a sign marking the border, one does not immediately feel as if Seaside and WaterColor are two very different developments.

    While both Duany and Peter Calthorpe seem to make claims to be the founders of the New Urbanism, Duany gets more attention. I’ve only met him once, at a conference. I was impressed with his presentation as honest and straightforward, even though I’m not a New Urbanist — quite the opposite, in fact. He spoke of his disdain for the suburbs, but agreed that 80% of the housing market preferred them, and then went on to speak of the benefits of New Urbanism.

    What I experienced in Seaside was much different than what I expected from watching The Truman Show. When the film was released, the main feature of a typical cookie-cutter suburban home was… well, uh, hmm… I guess you could describe it as quite featureless. But some developers and builders ventured forth into New Urbanism, or an emulation of the look. The home buyer was now faced with a choice: the requisite aluminum, white, three car garage door with the home hidden somewhere behind it, or a home with a front porch instead. Buyers became smitten. They may have still bought the garage snout home, but the writing was on the wall. The days of the vinyl clad / garage forward / featureless home were numbered, and if builders were smart, then they had to increase their architectural character. Many suburban homes gained a porch, some architectural detail, and a somewhat less prominent garage. Buyers started demanding walks and other amenities… and builders and developers responded until the housing market crashed.

    This evolution can be attributed more to the efforts of Duany than of anyone else. The Duany developments stand apart from some other New Urbanist development partly because of their detail and character, and partly because of their high price point. I’ve been to the Kentlands, I’on, Celebration, and now Seaside. The architectural and landscape detailing is outstanding. When I went to Kentlands, a decade ago, I got lost; it breaks from the Smart Growth grid theory. There was nobody sitting on the porches, and I saw only one person walking. To be fair it was during the workday. I was really looking forward to a stroll to the local coffee shop, but instead, the K-Mart strip center defined the entrance with no apparent internal commercial development. I understand that today there are more walkable services.

    On my I’on visit (on a nice weekend) I saw very large homes with only single car garages or no garages at all. Again, nobody was sitting on any of the porches (which were spacious and beautiful), but there were people strolling. I’on is a very large development, and the only one I visited that seemed to be planned on a grid. The only local businesses (at the time) were a chocolate shop, a hair stylist, and the I’on sales office. For anything else you would probably need to drive.

    Upon entering Celebration we were greeted by massive, majestic homes that align the main street. Very cool. This gives a feeling of arrival, as opposed to a suburban development that would typically showcase the highest density and cheapest product at the front entrance (blame Levittown transitional zoning for that). On a Sunday morning my wife and I had a coffee in the Celebration town center. We were alone, other than one other table where a real estate salesman was trying to sell one of the homes. The stores were open, but either people aren’t shopping before 11:00AM on Sunday mornings, or they simply get tired of frequenting that same shop that sells all items with “Celebration” logos. Again, not a soul on the front porches, and only a few on the walks.

    I distinctly remember Seaside from The Truman Show as well coiffed and manicured. Homes all behind picket fences. When we strolled the streets, the landscaping between each home and white picket fence was overgrown, making it difficult to see the homes and closing up space along the streets. There were no walks along the streets. There were natural trails in a straight pedestrian system behind each home along the rear yards, with paths so narrow (about 4’ between picket fences) that I needed to follow behind my wife as we strolled through the blocks (these paths were not in the movie).

    Many of the homes had observation towers hovering over the rooftops, cool architectural features that would allow a view of the shoreline. A decade after the development’s premiere, that open view was closed up by a wall of very large ocean view homes, blocking all those great views that the towers would have provided. There’s now little tie from the community to the shore other than a single bar elevated above the shops allowing a good view.

    In general, much of Seaside is overgrown with landscape that blocks the feeling of space. We were told by a few sources that only about twenty residences have full time owners, with the rest rented. There were a few restaurants and bars, and the same grocery store that was in The Truman Show, but the feel of the development was much different than what I expected after seeing the movie. The main street has rows of Airstream trailers with street vendors selling various food items, something I found distracting from the image of New Urbansim; very touristy. The general pattern of Seaside is quite maze-like, requiring us to carry a map as we took a stroll.

    By contrast, WaterColor has similar architectural character, but is much more diverse in its open spaces and provides the look of Seaside with a more suburban sense of space. Seaside homes generally lacked vehicle storage or protection from the elements; WaterColor homes had the convenience of garages — mostly, but not all, in alleys — and some carports. Garages are an indication of permanent residence, not a weekend jaunt. They keep many of the cars off the street and out of sight. Unlike a standard New Urbanism design that separates the garage from the home (as if a car contained some negative aura that could take control of our lives), the WaterColor homes had the garages attached. WaterColor is a place you can live in, not just rent for a week.

    If the nation’s suburban architectural character has improved, I think much of it is due to the effort that Duany has taken to showcase New Urbanism, which has had a positive influence in the overall character of land development. Whether New Urbanism thrives or it fails, he has left us this lasting gift. Duany developments I’ve visited are beautiful, even with their flaws and their high priced entry.

    But architecture and landscaping are NOT planning. And here lies the problem. You can take the worst planned neighborhood and showcase it with the Duany style of high quality elements —- his eye for architecture and landscaping —- and it will look great. In a well-planned suburban neighborhood, on the other hand, the display of repetitive garage-grove facades with plain vinyl siding, void of landscaping other than the requisite sod, will look awful. As people drive or stroll through the Duany development, they will naturally say it’s well planned, even if it’s dysfunctional, inefficient, and has a high environmental impact. This is not to say that it necessarily is, but you can’t feel those things from street level. The plain subdivision will be identified as terribly planned, even if the plan is functional and efficient with low environmental impacts.

    I’m not a follower of Duany and disagree with much of his ideology. But I do thank him for making the real world, suburban and urban —- not just the make-believe world of The Truman Show —- a better place.

    Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

    Photo: Seaside, Florida’s Post Office — Where they filmed ‘The Truman Show’

  • Queensland, We’ve Got a Problem

    Queensland Premier Anna Bligh MP has a problem. Reacting to sensationalized media reports of runaway population growth as well as an infrastructure lag revealing itself in everything from mounting congestion to a lack of hospital beds, Queensland residents are starting to say ‘enough.’ The prospects of continuing population growth at around 2.5% or 100,000 people per annum, despite the economic benefits this brings, are increasingly unpopular, something that gets the attention of most politicians.

    In many ways it’s ironic for Premier Bligh to find herself in this position. She follows a succession of Premiers who managed to get away with weekly media boasts of “1500 people every week” moving into the State, drawn – it was alleged – by our climate and lifestyle. In the past, any Premier who questioned this growth would have felt the result at the ballot box.

    Bligh’s response has been (in a time honoured tradition) to convene a ‘summit of experts’ and community representatives (you can read it all here), designed to thrash out a policy accord for the future. No politician worth their salt holds an inquiry unless they have a fair idea of the outcome in advance, so it’s a fair bet the outcomes will include even more regulatory controls on urban growth, in the name of ‘sustainability’ to appease the anti-growth coalition of greens and neo-Malthusians. Pro-growth lobbies on the other hand will be promised a ‘business as usual’ attitude to economic expansion, only under more ‘responsible’ oversight.

    But the biggest irony is that attempts to contain or control growth may be too late. It is just possible that the unthinkable will happen: growth will stall, and in coming years, a future Premier will be wondering what went wrong.

    How could this happen?

    First, a bit of history. Queensland’s growth status in the Australian context has been driven over the past 30 years almost entirely from interstate migration. Low state taxes, relatively cheap housing, aggressively pro business governments (including one which famously went too far) and a ‘Florida-like’ allure of lifestyle and warm climate all combined to make the state a population magnet. “The Sunshine State” – just like Florida – was how tourism promoters labeled it. “The low tax state” was the label peddled by business promoters. Both became interchangeable.

    In contrast, international migration to Australia was largely focused on Sydney and Melbourne. The rate of natural births over deaths was barely in the positive, resurrected recently by a Federal Government baby bonus of questionable long lasting effect. This left interstate migration as Queensland’s growth driver.

    Arrivals from Victoria or Sydney could famously relocate to the south east corner of Queensland and find themselves in a better quality home, in a more convenient location, and with cash left over. They were faced with shorter commute times, lower taxes and overall a better quality of life than the one they left behind.

    But in the late 1990s this all started to change. Increasing land use controls appeared as planners sought to ‘manage’ the growth of the state better. “We can’t destroy what you came to enjoy” became a new mantra, and an urban growth boundary for the popular south east was introduced under ‘smart growth’ principles. In the 1995-2000 period, three statutory plans appeared for the south east, followed by a 10 year regional planning program in 2000 (SEQ 2021) followed by an Office of Urban Management in 2004, a South East Queensland Regional Plan in 2005 and then an updated version in 2009.

    It’s become an industry joke that we now produce more plans than houses. But the inevitable consequence of this explosion of planning regulation – matched at the same time by the surreptitious introduction of exorbitant per lot housing levies under the guise of ‘user pays’ – was to drive up housing costs rapidly while drying up new supply.

    Queensland housing construction is now at a 20 year low. The median house price, which in 1999 was half that of Sydney’s, is now 80% of Sydney prices and roughly at 8 times average incomes. A thirty year or more tradition of relatively lower cost housing in Queensland has been smashed in the space of six or seven years.

    Also over the same period, the state’s tax advantage has been eroded. Once Queensland boasted some of the lowest vehicle registration fees in the country; now it has the highest. Electricity prices, also once amongst the cheapest of any state, are now just as expensive. Land and other property taxes have rapidly caught up with other states and overshot others. According to the Institute of Public Affairs IPA, state business taxes in just one year went from being the second lowest in the country in 2008 to mid field by 2009. Roads and other infrastructure which were once enjoyed as part of the general tax contribution are separately tolled, water is priced and charged separately from council rates to residents. Overall, the general cost of living advantage compared to interstate rivals has evaporated.

    The rapid erosion of Queensland’s relative tax and cost of living advantage prompted a writer for The Australian newspaper to lament in late 2009 that: “Queensland has squandered its low-tax edge and become a public-sector spendthrift, putting at risk its long-term growth potential and ability to attract investment.”

    In fairness, maintaining low taxes and funding a generational catch up in infrastructure might be mutually exclusive. The state is now undergoing a record level of infrastructure investment, in response to the growth it has witnessed. The timing for Premier Bligh though is not good: the benefits of this new wave of infrastructure might not be felt for some years. In the meantime, residents are growing increasingly impatient and the prospects of adding to population numbers are being met with increasing hostility. Some of the more alarmist messages of green and ‘no growth’ advocates are finding traction. Even leading Australian business figure like entrepreneur Dick Smith is warning that we will soon run out of food. This in a state larger than Texas with a population of just 4 million, and in a country with five times the amount of arable land per capita than the USA.

    Faced with funding a much larger public sector plus a big infrastructure program, the state is whetting its tax appetite. Plus, the popular sentiment now turning against population growth suggests that relief from excessive land use controls on housing supply or a meaningful reduction in the level of upfront per lot levies is remote at best.

    The results are already apparent. Interstate migration – once the single biggest driver of growth in Queensland – has collapsed and now accounts for just half the level of births over deaths and only one third the level of international migration. The sun still shines in the Sunshine State but Queensland is now longer the low tax (and low cost of living) state. With lower average incomes than other states, the sums no longer add up for many people. And as birth rates slow, without the international migration tap, Queensland’s population growth overall could hit the brakes. The risk here is compounded by the increasing pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to slow down international migration to Australia (for an example, see here). If that happened, growth could fall to record low levels almost overnight.

    So while Premier Bligh prepares for the population summit and its aftermath, it could prove the ultimate irony that measures to control the rate of population growth in Queensland become quickly redundant and the very least of our worries.

    Ross Elliott is a 20 year veteran of property and real estate in Australia, and has held leading roles with national advocacy organizations. He was written and spoken extensively on housing and urban growth issues in Australia and maintains a blog devoted to public policy discussion: The Pulse.

  • EPA Joins the Green Building Party

    By Richard Reep

    Well into the last decade, green design and smart growth operated as two separate and distinct reform movements. Both were widely celebrated in media, academic and planning circles, seeing themselves as noble causes albeit underdogs in the struggle against the mighty capitalistic enterprise of real estate development. Starting in 2009, the frozen credit market has kept private development moribund, and these two movements are somewhat moot as development takes a cease-fire.

    Yet now the two movements appear to be joined at the hip, a move encouraged by a federal bureaucracy and an Administration that embraces both groups’ agenda. In the process, what was once seen as an alternative to conventional development appears to be well on the way to becoming federally-mandated regulatory policy. The EPA, DOT, and HUD recently signed a memorandum of understanding to start making policy around green design and smart growth, turning these choices into federal standards.

    The standard bearer for green building, LEED certification, is the U. S. Green Building Council’s definition of energy efficiency and green design. A reform-focused movement, LEED established criteria by which a building’s energy and water use could be measured against a baseline, and the USGBC awards credits to the building when energy efficiency measures are achieved. LEED increases a building’s construction cost but reduces the building’s life cycle cost – monthly electric bills – and real estate developers, who gain nothing from lower energy costs, were slow to become interested in this choice. LEED was the domain of owner-operators like governments, who have a vested interest in keeping their future costs as low as possible, and was adopted as a criterion for capital expenditures by the GSA as well as many cities and counties by the close of the last millennium.

    Smart growth’s official champion is the Congress of the New Urbanism, which offers a design style choice for real estate developers. Developers, being profit oriented, historically have been loathe to tinker with what sells, and thus only in a few areas has New Urbanism gained a foothold. At its best, new urbanism represents a choice for homeowners who prefer dense, mixed-use communities that resemble traditional American towns, accentuating walkability and reducing residents’ dependence upon the car. In this key feature, Smart Growth advocates lobbied the U. S. Green Building Council to create a special category of LEED for Neighborhoods.

    Both movements promised reform. Both movements increased cost. Neither program was particularly effective at penetrating the real estate development market as long as the investment community favored large, formula-driven, profit-oriented real estate developers, and innovation consisted of product cost-cutting. The cost premium associated with each movement left them largely the playthings of boutique, niche-oriented developers aspiring to nobility while protecting their bottom line.

    Changes afoot in the last several months, however, are combining these two movements into one powerful force that turns these laudable movements away from choice and towards a prescriptive, and ultimately restrictive policy. Beginning in 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency encouraged communities to build walkable, energy-efficient growth within their boundaries, rather than continue spreading out – a surprising focus for an agency created to reduce pollution. Little else happened until late 2009, when suddenly the EPA began linking Energy Star (a Department of Energy program) to New Urbanist values such as walkability and mixed-use development. The EPA, which regulates pollution, has suddenly moved front-and-center into regulating growth, as if it were another type of pollution.

    At the same time, the U. S. Green Building Council yielded to heavy lobbying by the New Urbanist movement to create a new criterion, LEED Neighborhood Development. A developer may now submit a new land plan for certification to this LEED standard, and “smart growth” is being codified and standardized into a checklist and formula to be measured against a baseline. Like LEED for New Construction, these standards will also increase the cost for the developer desiring to build to these standards.

    Investors and developers may, on the surface, appear to have lost these dramatic battles. In the bigger picture, however, while the economy retools itself, it is not unusual to see regulation increase. If anyone remembers the S&L crisis of 1990-92, one of the biggest regulatory acts to affect real estate in modern times hit developers right between the eyes: The Americans with Disabilities Act. This reform removed physical barriers for all citizens with disabilities, but as a cost burden to developers it pales in comparison to the premiums that will be paid to meet the smart/green regulations currently being formulated by the Feds.

    Banks – hardly institutions with widely popular standing – stand to gain the most, because a developer who borrowed $10 million for a project in 2006 will probably need to borrow $11 or $12 million for the same project by the time bankers get around to discussing credit again. Developers also stand to gain, because as the cost goes up, so does the price. Coming out of the Millenial Depression, new construction will be faced with higher energy performance requirements, the higher costs associated with urban development, and a longer regulatory review process than ever before seen.

    The losers, of course, will be the vast majority of Americans who work hard and earn modest incomes. New home prices will increase, and renters will have to pay their landlords more to cover the increased costs of politically sanctioned development. While the affluent will be able to enjoy the benefits of a green, urbane lifestyle, the grocery store cashiers, dry cleaner clerks, housekeepers and artists who make up so much of our community will be forced out by the sheer cost of this movement – out to the suburbs, out to the exurbs, and out to the trailer parks beyond them. No green for you: your commute time just got much longer.

    Technology, of course, will eventually decrease in price and become more affordable; like VCRs and DVD players, the early adopters pay the freight until the appliance becomes a commodity. The same is likely true for exotic solutions like photovoltaics or low-voltage lighting as the marketplace sorts out what works from what doesn’t. So the impetus to go green will impose a crushing cost burden on new construction, which may gradually, over time, be absorbed into the mix.

    An affordable starter home in a low-cost subdivision, however, may be as doomed as leaded gasoline, and the American Dream will likely shift away from the landowner-based society once vaunted by Thomas Jefferson. The walkable lifestyle, now being exercised by free will, is well on its way to becoming federal government policy in a grand effort to incorporate reform and regulation into our lives from above.

    Whether or not this achieves the EPA’s mission to reduce pollution will only be discovered in the decades ahead as we incorporate the next hundred million Americans into the urban boundaries we have already set upon the land. It may be entirely possible to reach some of these goals without prescriptive overly burdensome regulation, yet this may only occur if political realities begin to reign in the current regulatory onslaught.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Photo by eng1ne

  • Don’t Mess With Texas

    One of the most ironic aspects of our putative “Age of Obama” is how little impact it has had on the nation’s urban geography. Although the administration remains dominated by boosters from traditional blue state cities–particularly the president’s political base of Chicago–the nation’s metropolitan growth continues to shift mostly toward a handful of Sunbelt red state metropolitan areas.

    Our Urbanist in Chief may sit in the Oval Office, but Americans continue to vote with their feet for the adopted hometown of widely disdained former President George W. Bush. According to the most recent Census estimates, the Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, region added 146,000 people between 2008 and 2009–the most of any region in the country–a healthy 2.3% increase.

    Other Texas cities also did well. Longtime rival Houston sat in second, with an additional 140,000 residents. Smaller Austin added 50,000–representing a remarkable 3% growth–while San Antonio grew by some 41,000 people.

    In contrast, most blue state mega cities–with the exception of Washington, D.C.–grew much more slowly. The New York City region’s rate of growth was just one-fifth that of Dallas or Houston, while Los Angeles barely reached one-third the level of the Texas cities.

    These trends should continue: According to Moody’s Economy.com, Texas’ big cities are entering economic recovery mode well ahead of almost all the major centers along the East or West Coasts. This represents a continuation of longer-term trends, both before and after the economic crisis. Between 2000 and 2009 New York gained 95,000 jobs while Chicago lost 257,000, Los Angeles over 167,000 and San Francisco some 216,000. Meanwhile, Dallas added nearly 150,000 positions and Houston a hefty 250,000.

    This leads me to believe that the most dynamic future for America urbanism–and I believe there is one–lies in Texas’ growing urban centers. To reshape a city in a sustainable way, you need to have a growing population, a solid and expanding job base and a relatively efficient city administration.

    None of these characteristics apply to places like President Obama’s hometown of Chicago, which continues to suffer from the downturn–but you would never know it based on media coverage of the Windy City.

    The New Yorker, for example, recently published a lavish tribute to the city and its mayor, Richard Daley. But as long-time Chicago observer Steve Bartin points out, the story missed–or simply ignored–many critical facts. Mistaking Daley’s multi-term tenure as proof of effectiveness, it failed to recognize the region’s continued loss of jobs, decaying infrastructure, rampant corruption and continued out-migration of the area’s beleaguered middle class.

    Generally speaking, as Urbanophile blogger Aaron Renn points out, the repeated reports of an urban renaissance in older northern cities should be viewed with skepticism. In the Midwest region over the past year the share of population growth enjoyed in core counties–an area usually much larger than the city boundary–actually declined in most major Midwestern metros, including Chicago.

    Yet urbanists generally have not embraced the remarkable growth in the major Texas metropolitan areas. Only Austin gets some recognition, since, with its hip music scene and more liberal leanings, it’s the kind of place high-end journalists might actually find tolerable. The three other big Texas cities have become the Rodney Dangerfields of urban America–largely disdained despite their prodigious growth and increasingly vibrant urban cores.

    Part of the problem stems from the fact that all Texas cities are sprawling, multi-polar regions, with many thriving employment centers. This seems to offend the tender sensibilities of urbanists who crave for the downtown-centric cities of yesteryear and reject the more dispersed model that has emerged in the past few decades.

    Yet despite planners’ prejudices, places like Houston and Dallas are more than collections of pesky suburban infestations. They are expanding their footprints to the periphery and densifying at the same time.

    Of course, like virtually all other regions, Houston and Dallas suffer excess capacity in both office buildings and urban lofts. But the real estate slowdown has not depressed Texans’ passion for inner city development. Indeed, over the past decade the central core of Houston–inside the boundaries of the 610 freeway loop–has experienced arguably the widest and most sustained densification in the country.

    An analysis of building permit trends by Houston blogger Tory Gattis, for example, found that before the real estate crash, the Texas city was producing more high-density projects on a per-capita basis than the urbanist mecca of Portland. Significantly, as Gattis points out, the impetus for this growth has largely resulted not from planning but from infrastructure investment, job growth and entrepreneurial venturing.

    This process is also evident in the Dallas area, which has experienced a surge in condo construction near its urban core and some very intriguing “town center” developments, such as the Legacy project in suburban Plano. In Big D, developers generally view densification not as an alternative to suburbia but another critical option needed in a growing region.

    It’s widely understood there that many people move to places like Dallas, whether in closer areas or exurbs, largely to purchase affordable single-family homes. But as the population grows, there remains a strong and growing niche for an intensifying urban core as well.

    Dallas and other Texas cities substitute the narrow notion of “or”–that is cities can grow only if the suburbs are sufficiently strangled–with a more inclusive notion of “and.” A bigger, wealthier, more important region will have room for all sorts of grand projects that will provide more density and urban amenities.

    This approach can be seen in remarkable plans for developing “an urban forest” along the Trinity River, which runs through much of Dallas. The extent of the project–which includes reforestation, white water rafting and restorations of large natural areas–would provide the Dallas region with 10,000 acres of parkland right in the heart of the region. In comparison, New York City’s Central Park, arguably the country’s most iconic urban reserve, covers some 800 acres.

    If it is completed within 10 years, as now planned, the Trinity River project will not only spawn a great recreational asset, but could revitalize many parts of the city that have languished over the past few decades. It could become a signature landmark in the urban development of 21st-century America.

    As we look at the coming decades, this Texan vision may help define a new urban future for a nation that will grow by roughly 100 million people by 2050. To get a glimpse of that future, urbanists and planners need to get beyond their nostalgic quest to recreate the highly centralized 19th-century city. Instead they should hop a plane down to Dallas or Houston, where the outlines of the 21st-century American city are already being created and exuberantly imagined.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by Stuck in Customs

  • The Not-So-Lucky Country

    President Obama’s last-minute decision to postpone his homecoming to Indonesia and a trip to Australia expands the list of friendly countries–which include France, the U.K. and most of Eastern Europe–that have received a presidential snub. Yet in putting off his Australia trip, Obama will also miss an opportunity to commune with the politician whom he most closely resembles.

    Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, like Obama, symbolizes a distinct shift in his country’s politics. Replacing the rough-hewn but long-serving Liberal Party leader John Howard, Rudd offered sophisticated Australians a better reflection of their own savoir faire, much as Obama restored the self-image of America’s Bush-wracked educated classes. Like Obama, Rudd is widely seen as smart and worldly as well as perhaps a bit rude and arrogant.

    On a more serious note, Rudd reflects a shift from the country’s foreign policy orientation, which historically focused on British and, later, American ties. Like Obama, Rudd has little patience for the old ties to the English-speaking world. A confirmed sinophile, Rudd clearly sees the sun rising in the east–or in his case, the north. He has made no bones of his post-European perspective and his interest of aligning his country closer to Beijing.

    Indeed the affection of Rudd, a former diplomat fluent in Mandarin, for things Chinese worries some Australians, given the Middle Kingdom’s increasingly assertive authoritarianism.. His coziness with the Communist Party bosses has provided fodder for clever comic videos from down under.

    Also like President Obama, Rudd epitomizes the ascendancy of a new “progressive” educated class in Australia that has little allegiance to the traditional notions of what constitutes “the good life” for the vast majority of citizens. Down under–even more than in America–the “good life” generally means a suburban home with a backyard.

    In contrast, Rudd’s core supporters are disgusted by what they see as a wasteful, anti-social suburban sprawl. Like their counterparts here in North America, they have embraced a climate change agenda that, as part of its dogma, seeks to densify Australia’s cities.

    Although the Labour Party’s roots lay with the working class and private sector unions, New City co-editor John Muscat contends that the Rudd Labour Party has transformed into an instrument of the bureaucracy and “progressive” gentry. The latter includes academics, green activists, media stars and some prominent business interests well-positioned to flourish in a hyper-regulated state.

    The losers, Muscat notes, are the traditional middle- and working-class constituencies of the party. Where the Labour government has in the past sought to help people fulfill their quest for the “Australian dream,” the current leadership plans to make it difficult for them to achieve it. “Green planners,” Muscat says, “engage in a form of class discrimination. The costs of climate change are heaped on outer-suburban working people, who lose jobs, mobility and housing amenity, while the affluent emerge unscathed.”

    Such a result would seem to be unnecessary in a vast country with a population that in 2050 will be smaller than California’s today. Australia has often been called “the lucky country” since its prodigious natural resources and fertile agriculture have long afforded an astonishingly high quality of life for its citizens. This position has been made even stronger as demand for commodities has skyrocketed in recent years, paced largely by demand from China, India and other developing countries.

    Yet now, at precisely the time that the Australian “dream” would appear, if anything, more supportable, the administration and local state governments seem determined to wage war against the aspirations of its own citizens. Strict limits on developing land on the periphery–something supported both by oligopolistic property interests and greens–have been turning Australia from highly affordable to one of the least affordable places to buy a home in the English-speaking world.

    These changes are evident in Sydney, a city that 20 years ago was filled with charming tree-lined, relatively low-density neighborhoods. Strict land regulation has made homes more expensive by restricting new subdivisions further in the periphery; indeed the city is now the second most expensive major housing market, based on income, in the English-speaking world, behind only Vancouver.

    At the same time that suburban housing has been limited, Sydney has allowed the spread of high-rise apartments into formerly bucolic neighborhoods. To many natives it seems less like the very livable old Australia and more like the overcrowded, frenzied new China. Similar policies are infecting other Australian cities, including Melbourne and Perth. As the New City bloggers warn, “Enjoy your country while it still exists.”

    Not surprisingly, the agenda embraced by Rudd, like that of Obama, also has had negative political consequences. Rudd’s attempt to force a “cap and trade” system on his country is problematic given the country’s dependence on fossil fuel and mineral production as well as greenhouse-gas-gushing big agriculture. In December Rudd’s cap and trade proposal was blocked by opposition in the Australian Senate, much as Obama’s cap and trade legislation has been stymied by malcontents, including some in his own party, in the American Senate.

    When they do finally get together, Obama and Rudd could also commiserate on their falling poll numbers. Rudd’s 74% support last year has declined to a new low of 48%. He now runs neck and neck in surveys with the opposition leader, Tony Abbott. Rudd wants to run largely on the issue of climate change, a course that one suspects Barack Obama may not be so deluded as to pursue.

    Of course, Rudd’s gentry liberal politics still play well among Sydney’s media mavens and pundits, just as Obama’s does in similar circles here. But they both are running into strong opposition from voters, with whom their appeal is clearly weakening.

    Ultimately, these two very modern leaders will have to face the consequences of their own worldviews, which are shaped primarily by a belief in the superiority of the prescriptions favored by the highly educated classes .This defines their approaches in everything from foreign policy and climate change to governing how people should live.

    The problem with this philosophy is that neither the U.S. nor Australia functions along the lines of Plato’s Republic, where the enlightened get to rule unhindered by the hoi polloi. Despite the preferences of their betters, citizens in both countries still have a say over what happens to them. This is something that may not bother Rudd’s Chinese Communist allies, but it can prove troublesome for those politicians wishing to take their people places they may not want to go.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by London Summit

  • Ruining our Cities to Save Them

    Latching onto Kevin Rudd’s call for “a big Australia” and forecasts that our population will grow by 60 per cent to 35 million in 2050, urban planners are ramping up their war against suburbia. In paper after paper, academics across the country have been pushing the same line. Climate change, peak oil and the financial crisis mean we can’t go on driving and borrowing for low-density housing. Choices must be narrowed to buying or renting compact homes in high-density, multi-unit developments along public transport corridors, preferably rail lines.

    Underlying it all is a radical vision of suburban doom. “That is one of my themes”, said Professor Peter Newman, anti-car activist and head of Curtin University‘s Sustainable Policy Institute, “that we stop cities developing into eco enclaves surrounded byMad Max suburbs”.

    The alarming truth is that planners are blasé about prosperity, living standards and choice because they see them as second-rate issues. The point is to save us from eco-apocalypse.

    And their voice grows louder by the day. The mantra of green urbanism has long been heard on ABC radio programs like Background Briefing and Future Tense, but matters reached a crescendo in January when ABC TV’s 7:30 Report rounded up the usual suspects for a four-part series on preparing our cities for the population boom. Framed by scary graphics and a menacing soundtrack, the series delivered a stream of breathless dialogue from talking heads like Newman, who declared that “if we just roll out those suburbs one after the other, making a more and more carbon intensive world in our cities, then we’re stuffed.”

    This current of thought has always lurked beneath the Rudd Government’s “nation building” agenda. But last October it burst open when the prime minister announced his plans to wrest control of urban policy from the states.

    Rattling off tenets of the planning ideology, Mr Rudd said “we must ensure that communities are not separated from jobs and services”, that “increasing density in cities is part of the solution to urban growth”, that “forms of development need to be fully integrated with current and future transport networks”, that “climate change requires a whole of government response”, and that “we must make long-term investments in transport networks that minimise carbon emissions.” It’s all a question of government action, if he is to be believed.

    That too was the message from infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese at the recent launch of State of Australian Cities 2010. Little wonder that he appointed Newman to the board of Infrastructure Australia.

    Defying urban laws of gravity

    “Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success” said the great urbanist Jane Jacobs, but today’s planners seem to think they’re as pliable as dough. Just tweak a couple of variables, say transport modes and population densities, and everything falls into place.

    As a discipline, urban planning never emerged from behind Berlin Wall of command economics, albeit with a green face. Early hopes that the financial crisis would shift public sentiment in this direction have faded, and climate change hasn’t registered as an issue for commuters and home buyers.

    Despite this, planners show no sign of losing confidence in their power to abolish fundamental laws of supply and demand. They’re still apt to dream up grand schemes for zoning, development and infrastructure controls with barely a thought about the impact on land values and bid-rents, two price inputs with far-reaching implications for urban commerce.

    Nor have they managed to repeal the law of unintended consequences. Year after year, the Demographia housing affordability survey confirms the link between “more prescriptive land use regulation” and high median house prices. This is elementary economics. Restricting the supply of land for development, a starting point for all green planning, combined with rising demand from population growth, will ratchet up values, with knock-on effects for the whole economy. The survey continues to rank all of our capital cities, and some of our regional centres, in the “severely unaffordable” category. No amount of “cutting-edge design” or “more imaginative” planning can counter this effect.

    The claim that concentrating development in dense “activity centres”, “urban villages” or “transport corridors” will ease the problem is a sham. Development controls will always drive up the price of land. When planners talk about affordability in this context, they really mean inferior housing in terms of space, amenity and title, even if it’s dressed-up as “design innovation” or “green rated building”.

    But inferior quality may not be enough to compensate for escalating land values, so consumers get less housing for higher prices. And more are stuck renting instead of buying. Large numbers of low to middle income earners will be shut out of the housing market

    Interestingly, Perth appears in Demographia’s “severely unaffordable” category along with Sydney and Melbourne, despite having only around a quarter of the population. Newman neglected this detail while praising the city’s rail network on the 7:30 Report.

    Though Perth can fall back on the resources boom, south-eastern cities aren’t so lucky. They are service-based regions with very dispersed patterns of employment, even by world standards.

    Writing in a publication of the 2008 9th World Congress of Metropolis, Sydney University’s John Black observed that “apart from some noticeable peaks, employment density is quite uniform across the [Sydney metropolitan] region”. According to the NSW Department of Transport, only 12 per cent of Sydney’s jobs are in the CBD and second tier centres like North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta, Hurstville and Penrith have less than 2 per cent each. David McCloskey, Bob Birrell and Rose Yip of Monash University (demographers, not urban planners) report the same about Melbourne. The CBD hosts around 20 per cent of jobs and the rest are scattered all over the metropolitan region.

    Platitudes like “we must locate people close to where they work”, or “we must locate jobs close to where people live”, have little basis in reality. They infringe another immovable law of economics, relating to economic rents or bid-rents. This mechanism determines how industries and firms are distributed. Put simply, a parcel of land will go to whichever use delivers the highest profits. Centrally located land (near major transport or infrastructure hubs) commands high prices, and goes to the most profitable uses. Peripheral land goes to less profitable or marginal activities.

    Over the last thirty years, economic deregulation, flexible transport, advanced communications and population growth have raised up a sector in the latter category, extracting value from cheap outer-metropolitan land and low rents. It includes industries like transport and distribution, building and construction, food, consumer products, personal services, wholesale and retail. They depend on favourable location costs and proximity to urban markets and labour pools. According to the Greater Western Sydney Economic Development Board, “prime industrial land with direct access to transport infrastructure is 75% cheaper [in GWS] than other areas of Sydney”.

    Ultimately, green planning will phase out cheap urban land, undermining this sector and destroying jobs in the process. Breakthroughs in automotive and energy technologies offer the prospect of adaptation to a distant future of expensive oil. There’s no way to adapt to rising land values.

    Green rated chaos

    Many are in denial about this, recycling visions of the “concentric ring model” of urban form. This relic of pre-war sociology allocated industry to the core, or cores, and residences to the periphery. Take the Sydney Morning Herald sponsored Long Term Public Transport Plan, recently released with great fanfare. Authored by a committee of green-tinged experts and academics, the plan proclaims, according to a Herald feature, that “Sydney retains a strong centre-based structure, with nearly 40 per cent of the city’s jobs and most of its major retail, educational and entertainment facilities located within 26 key centres”. This is an essential precondition for the proposed network of denser rail infrastructure.

    But the plan’s own figures don’t add up to Sydney having a “strong centre-based structure”. A hefty 60 per cent of jobs aren’t centralised and the plan actually cites 33 “centres” flung all over the Sydney region, from Norwest Business Park in the north, to Penrith in the west and Hurstville in the south. Apart from the CBD with 12 per cent, none of the centres have more than 1.8 per cent of Sydney’s jobs.

    Concentrating housing in a city of dispersed jobs means horrendous traffic congestion, the costs of which loom large in State of Australian Cities 2010. Currently, around 72.3 per cent of Sydney’s people drive to work. No configuration of public transport will be efficient, leaving motorists to converge on dense localities. This is a city projected to explode from today’s 4.2 million people to 7 million in 2050. In Melbourne’s case, McCloskey, Birrell and Yip state plainly that raising densities along tram and train lines will end in chaos. Of the 1.4 million people who work outside central Melbourne, only 4.4 per cent use public transport.

    On the other hand, attempts to concentrate jobs will throw thousands onto the dole queues. At least this is a type of solution: the unemployed don’t commute.

    Ironically, some thriving “centres” in the Herald plan wouldn’t exist without the expansion of Sydney’s arterial road network. Examining the “edge city” phenomenon in Sydney, Peter Murphy and Robert Freestone conceded, way back in 1994, that the jobs-rich “global arc corridor” owed a lot to strategic road junctions like the intersection of Lane Cove Road with Epping Road in North Ryde and with the Pacific Highway in Gordon.

    “The most prestigious development has overwhelmingly favoured the middle-ring northern and north-western parts of Sydney in centres easily accessible by car …” say Murphy and Freestone, having explained that “there are now diversified employment centres in the suburbs which have grown up almost despite, rather than because of, traditional land-use planning policies”. These days the NSW Government bows to green intimidation, failing in its new Metropolitan Transport Plan to complete the highly successful Orbital Motorway Network, leaving M4 West, the F3 link and duplication of the M5 tunnel in limbo.

    Demands that at we reshape our cities to fight climate change are illogical. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that there’s a case to cut Australia’s 1.4 per cent contribution to global carbon. Even the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consumption Atlas ranks urban settlement patterns well below the general level of consumption as a factor in emissions. And general consumption is a function of living standards, not urban form. Since the world is far from putting constraints on consumption, calls for a transformation of settlement patterns are baseless.

    But it’s worse. The Consumption Atlas and an analysis by Demographia’s Wendell Cox disclose that emissions across affluent inner-urban areas exceed those on the fringe. By focusing on settlement patterns rather than consumption levels, green planners engage in a form of class discrimination. The costs of climate change are heaped on outer-suburban working people, who lose jobs, mobility and housing amenity, while the affluent emerge unscathed.

    This article first apeared at The New City Journal

    Photo by Amit (Sydney)

  • Forced March To The Cities

    California is in trouble: Unemployment is over 13%, the state is broke and hundreds of thousands of people, many of them middle-class families, are streaming for the exits. But to some politicians, like Sen. Alan Lowenthal, the real challenge for California “progressives” is not to fix the economy but to reengineer the way people live.

    In Lowenthal’s case the clarion call is to take steps to ban free parking. This way, the Long Beach Democrat reasons, Californians would have to give up their cars and either take the bus or walk to their local shops. “Free parking has significant social, economic and environmental costs,” Lowenthal told the Los Angeles Times. “It increases congestion and greenhouse gas emissions.”

    Scarily, his proposal actually passed the State Senate.

    One would hope that the mania for changing how people live and work could be dismissed as just local Californian lunacy. Yet across the country, and within the Obama Administration, there is a growing predilection to endorse policies that steer the bulk of new development into our already most-crowded urban areas.

    One influential document called “Moving Cooler”, cooked up by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Urban Land Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others, lays out a strategy that would essentially force the vast majority of new development into dense city cores.

    Over the next 40 years this could result in something like 60 million to 80 million people being crammed into existing central cities. These policies work hard to make suburban life as miserable as possible by shifting infrastructure spending to dense areas. One proposal, “Moving Cooler,” outdoes even Lowenthal by calling for charges of upwards of $400 for people to park in front of their own houses.

    The ostensible justification for this policy lies in the dynamics of slowing climate change. Forcing people to live in dense cities, the reasoning goes, would make people give up all those free parking opportunities and and even their private vehicles, which would reduce their dreaded “carbon imprint.”

    Yet there are a few little problems with this “cramming” policy. Its environmental implications are far from assured. According to some recent studies in Australia, the carbon footprint of high-rise urban residents is higher than that of medium- and low-density suburban homes, due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages, and the highly consumptive lifestyles of more affluent urbanites.

    Moreover, it appears that even those who live in dense places may be loath to give up their cars. Over 90% of all jobs in American metropolitan regions are located outside the central business districts, which tend to be the only places well suited for mass transit.

    Indeed, despite the massive expansion of transit systems in the past 30 years, the percentage of people taking public transportation in major metropolitan regions has dropped from roughly 8% to closer to 5%. Even in Portland, Ore.–the mecca for new wave transit consciousness–the share of people using transit to get to work is now considerably less than it was in 1980. In recent months overall transit ridership nationwide has actually dropped.

    These realities suggest that densification of most cities–with the exceptions of New York, Washington and perhaps a few others–cannot be supported by transit. Furthermore, drivers in dense cities will be confronted with not less congestion, but more, which will likely also boost pollution. The most congested cities in the country tend to be the densest, such as Los Angeles, Sen. Lowenthal’s bailiwick, which is in an unenviable first place.

    Then there is the little issue of people’s preferences. Urban boosters have been correct in saying that until recently there have been too few opportunities for middle-class residents to live in and around city cores. But over the past decade many cities have gone for broke with dense condo and rental housing and have produced far more product, often at very high cost, than the market can reasonably bear.

    Initially, when the mortgage crisis broke, the density advocates built much of their case on the fact that the biggest hits took place in suburban areas, particularly on the fringe. Yet as suburban construction ended, cities continued building high-density urban housing–sometimes encouraged by city subsidies. As a result, in the last two years massive foreclosures have plagued many cities, and many condominiums have been converted to rentals. This is true in bubble towns like Las Vegas and Miami; “smart-growth” bastions like Portland and Seattle; and even relatively sane places such as Kansas City, Mo. All these places have a massive amount of high-density condos that are either vacant or converted into lower-cost rentals.

    Take Portland. The city’s condo prices are down 30% from their original list price. The 177-unit Encore, one of the fanciest new towers, has closed sales on 12 of its units as of March, while another goes to auction. Meanwhile in New York half-completed structures dot Brooklyn’s once-thriving Williamsburg neighborhood, while the massive Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan teeters at the edge of bankruptcy.

    Finally, it is unlikely that cities would be able to accommodate the massive growth promoted by urban boosters, land speculators and policy mavens. Aaron Renn, who writes the influential Urbanophile blog, says that most American cities today struggle to maintain their current infrastructure. They also have limited options to zone land for high-density construction, due in part to grassroots opposition to existing residential neighborhoods. Overall they would be hard-pressed to accommodate much more than 10% of their region’s growth, much less 50% or 60%.

    Given these realities, and the depth of the current recession, one might think that governments would focus more on basics like jobs and fixing the infrastructure–in suburbs as well as cities–than reengineering how people live. Yet it is increasingly clear that for many “progressives” the real agenda is not enabling people to achieve their dreams–especially in the form of a suburban single-family house. It is, instead, forcing them to live in what is viewed as more ecologically and socially preferable density.

    In the next few months we may see more of the kind of hyperregulation proposed by the likes of Sen. Lowenthal. It is entirely possible that a hoary coalition of HUD, Department of Transportation and EPA bureaucrats could start trying to restrict future housing development along the lines suggested in “Moving Cooler.”

    Yet over time one has to wonder about the political efficacy of this approach. Right now Americans are focused primarily on simply economic growth–and perhaps a touch less on the intellectual niceties of the “smart” form. In addition they are increasingly skeptical about climate change, which serves as the primary raison d’etre behind the new regulatory schema.

    Given the zealousness of the density advocates, perhaps the only thing that will slow, and even reverse, this process will be the political equivalent of a sharp slap across the face. Unless the ruling party begins to reacquaint itself with the preferences and aspirations of the vast majority of Americans, they may find themselves experiencing repeats of their recent humiliating defeat–manufactured largely in the Boston suburbs–in true-blue Massachusetts.

    Americans–suburban or urban–may resist a return to unbridled and extreme Republicanism, whether on social issues or in economic policy. But forced to choose between Neanderthals, who at least might leave them alone in their daily lives, and higher-order intellects determined to reengineer their lives, they might end up supporting bipeds lower down the evolutionary chain, at least until the progressive vanguard regains a grip on common sense.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo: Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton

  • Transit Oriented Development: If Not San Francisco, Where?

    “The Great Transit Oriented Development Swindle?” reads the headline in the Fog City Journal, one of the growing number of internet newspapers providing serious, professional web-based journalism as an alternative to declining print newspapers (and their often less than effective web sites).

    The article does not directly answer the question in the headline, but certainly provides enough ammunition to what has become a commonly accepted mantra among planners and urban boosters. It reveals how transit oriented development (TOD) is often based upon fragile foundations that amount to an ideological swindle. It is important to recognize that the Fog City Journal is no right wing or libertarian organ. There is little market for that in the city of San Francisco. The leftish bent of the Fog City Journal, combined with author Marc Salomon’s unusually incisive (and footnoted) analysis makes this article noteworthy. It also seems clear that the author is a proponent of more transit service and funding, not less – even though he is highly skeptical about the current TOD craze.

    Transit Oriented Development: The idea behind transit oriented development is that, in new, higher density developments, people use transit more and cars less. Transit oriented development has become a first principle of some, who seem to believe that cities can become vibrant in part by strangling new suburbs out of existence. Transit oriented development is at the very heart of the Obama Administration’s “livability agenda,” and is frequently cited admiringly by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.

    Eastern Neighborhoods: Salomon’s subject is San Francisco’s Eastern Neighborhoods, where transit oriented development is proposed. From the beginning Salomon identifies a fundamental problem: “Transit Oriented Development is predicated upon the notion that existing transit infrastructure is attractive enough such that residents of new units will take transit to work instead of drive. He continues: “The existing transit system, both regional and local, is not capable of handling existing demand.”

    Salomon correctly notes that “San Francisco is not the regional employment center.” In fact, nearly 90% of employment in the San Francisco-San Jose area is not in downtown San Francisco. Indeed, Silicon Valley, not downtown San Francisco, has long been the largest employment center in the area and there are also major job concentrations in the suburban belt east of Oakland.

    No Better Place for Transit Oriented Development: Yet, there are few places in the world better served by transit than the Eastern Neighborhood transit oriented development. The project is no more than a long walk from downtown San Francisco (Figure 1). Residents will be able to access frequent “Muni” bus services. The development would be well served by BART (the regional metro), midway between two stations, both of which access four routes. There are few places in the world where a non-transfer station serves that many routes. Salomon analyzes transit from the center of the development, the corner of Mission and 20th Streets.

    Transit Oriented Development: Forcing Longer Commutes: Salomon’s concern starts with the recognition that these systems are already overcrowded. However there is more. Even with their heavy (and highly subsidized) loads, the virtually unparalleled level of transit service available from Mission and 20th cannot compete with the automobile. Salomon’s analysis shows that, on average, transit oriented development residents working at jobs at the 30 largest firms in the San Francisco Bay area would spend nearly 3.5 as much time traveling to work by transit than if they drove themselves. The best transit travel time would be more than double the auto travel time, while the worst would near five times (Figure 2).

    Transit Oriented Development: Making Traffic Congestion Worse: Mirroring the research on the association between higher densities and greater traffic congestion, Salomon suggests that without substantial additional transit spending, transit oriented development “in San Francisco will most likely diminish transit reliability by increasing auto trips–the precise opposite of transit oriented development’s stated goals.” On this point, however, it is well to remember that no transit system has ever been seriously conceived, much less proposed or implemented that could provide competitive mobility between Mission and 20th and the dispersed employment throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. A transit system that reaches all of the dispersed employment in a modern American or European urban area at travel times competitive with the car could require annual expenditures that approach or even exceed the gross domestic product of the area.

    Unaffordable Transit Oriented Development: But Salomon is not through. Insufficient transit service is only part of the problem. There is a fundamental problem with the thesis that “cities need to densify their urban cores to support greater densities of development.” But, he says, “this is predicated upon the assumption that housing in the urban core and periphery are fungible, that the core and periphery compete interchangeably for buyers.”

    Unlike most urban advocates and the Secretary of Transportation, it is apparent that Salomon understands the first principle of “livability.” Livability requires affordability. In San Francisco suburb of Brentwood, for example, Salomon notes that the median house price is $298,000. Brentwood is located in eastern Contra Costa County, approximately 50 miles from downtown San Francisco. But there is no need to travel that far, since there is an abundance of jobs much closer.

    This compares to a median price of $627,000 for an apartment/condominium near the proposed transit oriented development in San Francisco. Further, the house in Brentwood will be more than double the size of condo in the transit oriented development, as data from zillow.com indicates. Thus, the new home buyer will pay less than one-fourth the cost per square foot in Brentwood compared to the transit oriented development (Figure 3). The Brentwood household will also enjoy a backyard that would not come with a 23rd floor flat.

    Lifestyles of the Few: None of this is to suggest that transit oriented development cannot be attractive. The mistake, however, is the outsized enthusiasm of its proponents. Like a Mini Cooper or sportscar, transit oriented development serves the needs and wants of a narrow niche market, but by no means anything close to the majority.

    Salomon concludes:

    In order for transit oriented development to check sprawl, prospective home buyers would be expected to make the choice between purchasing a $300K unit in Brentwood or a unit costing twice that much in San Francisco. Further, in order to check motor vehicle commutes, the assumption would be that someone paying that urban location premium would more than double their commute time by taking transit.

    Simply stated, many of the claims of transit oriented development proponents simply do not “pencil out.” TOD residents will have to drive, unless their jobs are within walking distance. Further, in the dynamic economy that has developed in US urban areas, few can assume that they will always work in the same place. Most importantly, however, very few suburbanites could afford the tony TODs. That’s not a problem, however, since most of them are probably not sorely tempted.

    Photograph: Market Street Toward the Ferry Building, San Francisco

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Green Wash: The Church of Sustainability

    The term green-wash is used to describe something that has been promoted as ‘green’, but is not. Has the term ‘sustainability’ worn out its welcome as well?

    I am a long time adviser to the board of Sustainable Land Development International. Like many other organizations, they market themselves as producing sustainable land developments through new technologies and methods in design. We often use the term “sustainable” in relation to a concept called the “Triple Bottom Line”: People, Planet, and Profit, endorsed by the United Nations in 2007 for urban and community accounting.

    On March 11th, I will have the honor to be the keynote speaker at the California League of Cities conference in Anaheim. When I speak, it is typically on the topic of sustainable solutions. This time, I was astonished to learn that the term sustainability had become green-wash and that I should avoid using it!

    Individual perspectives (or goals or agendas) can easily color the meaning of sustainability. For example, an environmental engineer might want to promote elements of land development that makes his or her career more important and personally satisfying. All of us have personal agendas that make our brief existence on this planet more meaningful, sometimes at the expense of others or even the very thing we are trying to promote. Often we unwittingly become our own worst enemy.

    At one time our firm began a relationship with one of the largest environmental engineering firms. When we spoke to their engineers about reducing pollutants from rain run-off caused by development it became clear that their only agenda was to eliminate, not to reduce, pollutants. Eliminating pollutants on a land development certainly is possible, but would not be in any way financially feasible. This firm had built a reputation and won over some very large non-profit organizations that fueled their success. Surely the engineers had their self-esteem (egos) inflated. If the developments they designed had to be financially viable without huge non-profit subsidies, they surely would have failed — spectacularly. They were artificially sustainable. Our goal was to use their expertise to create methods that would not add a penny to land development costs compared to conventional construction. We believed pollutants could have been reduced somewhere between 10% and 30%, which would have a significant international impact. As we began to work together it became quite apparent that our agendas were much different, and the relationship withered. Their all-or- nothing approach was not a balanced one, nor was it sustainable.

    Nearly two decades ago when I developed “Coving” as a method to design projects, my own ego got in the way of progress. At the time, the New Urban momentum had begun to grow. I aggressively compared the advantages of Coving to the grid form of traditional development as well as to conventional subdivision design. Reducing streets — “Coving” — by 20% to 50% without reducing density in comparison to a traditional grid certainly had benefits, but the attempt to push an agenda by reducing the importance of others agendas does not win friends, and New Urbanism had already won many converts.

    Coving by itself is only a streetscape design method, nothing else. The efficiency of coving opened up new opportunities to create more functional and financially viable development. . Both coving and the traditional grid pattern rely solely on the performance of the developer and builders to construct to a high level of architectural and landscape standards. The New Urbanism expanded upon the traditional grid to include a strict standard that included many details. Coving remained only a streetscape design method, void of these details. In the hands of a substandard developer with builders who cut corners, both Coving and New Urbanism have resulted in some embarrassingly awful land developments, tarnishing both movements reputations. Coving, particularly because of its financial advantages, seemed to attract some of the worst culprits. Unfortunately, in land development the time from concept plan to enough of a built environment to see the “finished” product can be between two and five years. We had become our own worst enemy by focusing too much on the financial benefits of a design method and not enough on other aspects.

    There were still some spectacular developments that resulted, but there was no mechanism in place to assure great neighborhoods. By the end of the 1990’s it was clear that “our agenda” needed to be modified. In an attempt to achieve a more sustainable world, we had concentrated on a singular goal, not a balanced approach. This meant we needed to step back and look at all the elements of land development to create a balanced approach where no one agenda held the others hostage. Ultimately this led to the creation of a comprehensive approach to land development we coined as Prefurbia.

    Land planning today has become like a religion that requires unwavering devotion. But those who embrace only one approach as the ultimate utopian mega-metropolis design to solve all social ills are fools: There is no singular solution for land development. Not the New Urbanism, not Smart Growth, not Prefurbia. Good planning is not about pointing fingers. It is easy to blame the automobile, blame developers, and blame government. But it is up to those people responsible for growth — stakeholders such as the developer, builders, city staff and council — to determine the best possible path that will result in a legacy for future generations instead of a blighted project that served to fill the bank account of the developer.

    It is also up to the stakeholders to investigate and learn the various options available for growth. If a city planning commission or council member does not have the time to learn the different land development options available today, well, they should step down and be replaced by someone who cares.

    All of this brings us back to the term ‘sustainability’. The dictionary defines it as ‘Capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment’. Here is the problem: The dictionary does not include the long term affect on economics (affordability) and living standards. Did we create something great for the ducks, but an eventual blighted neighborhood, or a gentrified one exclusively for the wealthy?

    My view of how to be sustainable is simple: Do our best to create places that will still be wonderful, livable, affordable, and environmentally responsible for future generations. If we do, we will have created places that will be sustainable, no matter what planning religion we worship.

    Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

  • New Traffic Scorecard Reinforces Density-Traffic Congestion Nexus

    Inrix, an industry provider of traffic information, has just published its third annual Traffic Scorecard, which ranks the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas based upon the intensity of their peak hour traffic congestion in 2009. The results provide further evidence of the association between higher urban population densities and more intense traffic congestion.

    Los Angeles, Again: Not surprisingly, Los Angeles is again the most congested metropolitan area over 1,000,000 population. In Los Angeles, roadway travel takes nearly 34.7% more in peak periods than when there is no congestion. This means that a trip that would take 30 minutes without congestion would take, on average 40.5 minutes during peak periods.

    The principal measure used by Inrix is the Travel Time Index, which was developed by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), for its congestion reports that started in 1982. TTI’s latest Urban Mobility Report is for 2007. The Inrix measures are developed from actual GPS vehicle readings. This information is also provided to TTI to assist in preparation of its annual Urban Mobility Report.

    Measuring Delay: In the new edition, Inrix switches from using the Travel Time Index to what it calls the Travel Time Tax. The difference between the two measures is that the Travel Time Tax measures the percentage of delay, such as 35% in Los Angeles, while the Travel Time Index would state the figure as 1.35. The new method is preferable because differences in traffic congestion are more readily apparent. . For example, a metropolitan area having a Travel Time Tax of 15% would have 50% worse traffic congestion than a metropolitan area having a Travel Time Tax of 10%. This large difference is not as obvious when comparing the Travel Time Index values of 1.15 and 1.10. The “Travel Time Tax” parlance, however, is less than optimal and this article will use “average congestion delay” instead.

    Ranking the Metropolitan Areas: The average congestion delay in Los Angeles was much worse than in the other largest metropolitan areas, just as its core urban area density is well above that of anywhere else in the US, including New York (where far less dense suburbs more than negate the density advantage in the core city). It also doesn’t help that a number of planned freeways were cancelled in Los Angeles over the last 50 years.

    Among the large metropolitan areas, Washington, DC had the second worst Average congestion delay, at 22.4%, followed by San Francisco, at 21.5%, Austin at 20.7% and New York at 19.7%. Austin may seem to have placed surprisingly high, however this was the nation’s last large metropolitan area to open a full freeway to freeway interchange and has only recently begun to develop a comprehensive freeway system, through the addition of toll roads. Austin’s late roadway development is the result of two factors. Austin was too small in 1956 to receive a beltway under the interstate highway system and an anti-freeway movement delayed construction for decades.

    Inrix also develops an average congestion delay for the worst commuting hour. Los Angeles also has the most congested worst hour, with an average congestion delay of 69%. Austin ranked second worst at 55%, while San Francisco was third at 46%, Washington, DC fourth at 45% and New York fifth at 44%.

    Honolulu: Almost as Bad as Los Angeles: Smaller metropolitan areas also exhibited intense traffic congestion. Honolulu had an average congestion delay nearly as bad as Los Angeles, at 32.4% and a worst hour average congestion delay of 64%. The core urban area of Honolulu has the highest density of any metropolitan area between 500,000 and 1,000,000 population. New York exurb Bridgeport-Stamford had a worst hour average congestion delay of 63%, with a peak period average congestion delay of 18.0%.

    Inrix: Density and Traffic Congestion: Virtually all of the congestion and most of the analyzed road mileage is in the urban areas, rather than in the rural areas that make up the balance of the metropolitan areas. The metropolitan areas with more dense urban areas tend to have worse traffic congestion, as the table below indicates.

      • Metropolitan areas with core urban densities (see Note 1) of more than 4,000 per square mile had peak period average congestion delays of 18.4%, which is more than three times that of metropolitan areas with core urban densities of less than 2,000 (5.9%).

      • Metropolitan areas with core urban densities of more than 4,000 per square mile had worst peak hour average congestion delays of 37.5%, which is nearly 2.4 times that of metropolitan areas with core urban densities of less than 2,000 (15.9%).

    These relationships are similar to those indicated in the Texas Transportation Institute data for 2007.

    Traffic Congestion & Urban Density in the United States: 2009
    Core Urban Area Density (2000) Peak Period Average Congestion Delay: 2009 Compared to Least Dense Category Worst Hour Average Congestion Delay: 2009 Compared to Least Dense Category
    Over 4,000 18.4% 3.26 37.5% 2.36
    3,000-3,999 10.0% 1.76 22.3% 1.41
    2,000-2,999 7.3% 1.30 17.7% 1.12
    Under 2,000 5.6% 1.00 15.9% 1.00
    Density: Population per square mile
    Travel Time Tax: Additional travel time required due to traffic congestion
    2000 population density is the latest reliable data
    Calculated from INRIX & 2000 Census data

    Sierra Club Data Also Shows Nexus: Moreover, the association between higher densities and greater traffic congestion is indicated by the ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability Density-VMT Calculator, which is based upon Sierra Club research. According to the Calculator, under the “smart growth” scenario, residential housing would be 15 units per acre, as opposed to its “business as usual” scenario at a typical density of four housing units per acre. The density of traffic (vehicle miles per square mile) under the higher density “smart growth” strategy would be 2.5 times as high as under the “business as usual” scenario (Figure).

    The Inevitable Comparisons: Invariably, analysts (smart growth advocates and me) like to point out relationships between Portland, with its “smart growth” policies and Atlanta, the least dense major urban area in the world. The Inrix data shows Portland to have an average peak hour delay of 12.2%, which is 15% worse than Atlanta (10.6%). Portland is nearly twice as dense as Atlanta, while Atlanta’s traffic congestion is made worse by one of the most decrepit freeway and arterial systems in the nation.

    A National Vision: Inrix has also developed a monthly national congestion delay factor. Inrix notes that traffic congestion had been improving as driving declined due to the Great Recession. However, Inrix refers to reduction in driving as “lucky,” and notes that without a “national vision” that “includes addressing congestion as a national priority,” greater traffic congestion will result.

    There is indeed good reason to address traffic congestion. As David Hartgen and M. David Fields have shown, there is a strong relationship between the higher levels of mobility that occur with less congestion and greater economic growth. Obviously that relationship extends to higher urban densities, which are associated with economically counter-productive levels of traffic congestion.

    But there is more than jobs and the economy. More intense traffic congestion produces more intense air pollution as well as more greenhouse gas emissions. It is well to remember that public health was the rationale for air pollution regulation. Air pollution’s negative impacts are so local that they are measured in the quality of life of individual people, especially those in close proximity to unnecessarily overcrowded roads. It is ironic that the higher density promoted by smart growth advocates exposes urban residents to more intense air pollution.

    Note 1: 2000 core urban area (urbanized area) population densities are used in this analysis because there is no later reliable information. The next reliable urban area density data will be a product of the 2010 census. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) produces later urban area density figures, many of which are substantially inconsistent with those of the United States Bureau of the Census, which is the primary source of such information. For example, as late as 2005, FHWA reported the Houston urban area to have 1.3 million fewer people than the Bureau of the Census, while reporting a land area nearly 250 square miles larger than the census had measured. Of course, this is a physical impossibility. The result was that Houston’s density was overstated by 45%.

    Note 2: Inrix also ranks metropolitan areas using an “overall congestion” measure, which is simply all congestion added up. As a result, the overall congestion measure is heavily weighted by population. This is illustrated by comparing Los Angeles and Honolulu. These metropolitan areas have very similar average congestion delays, as noted above. This means that drivers encounter similar traffic delays during peak in Los Angeles and Honolulu. However, Honolulu’s overall congestion measure is 95% less than that of Los Angeles, principally driven by the fact that Honolulu’s population is 93% less. As such, the overall congestion measure is of little relevance to people in their day to day commute or as a comparative measure of the intensity of congestion between areas.

    Photograph: Los Angeles City Hall.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”