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  • Atlanta Resoundingly Rejects Transit Tax

    Atlanta area voters said "no" to a proposed $7 billion transportation tax that was promoted as a solution to the metropolitan area’s legendary traffic congestion, despite a campaign in which supporters outspent opponents by more than 500 to one.

    With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the measure lost 63% to 37%. This 26% margin of loss was nearly three times the margin shown in most recent poll by the Journal-Constitution. Proponents had claimed on the weekend that the measure was "dead even" three days before the election.

    Proponents spent heavily on the campaign, with reports ranging up to $8.5 million in campaign donations, indicating a cost to contributors of more than $30 per vote. Opponents raised less than $15,000.

    The tax issue failed in all 10 counties. The defeats were modest in Fulton County (the core county, which includes most of the city of Atlanta) and DeKalb County (which contains the rest of Atlanta). Huge "no" vote margins were recorded in the largest suburban counties. In Gwinnett County, the no votes prevailed by a margin of 71% to 29%. In adjacent Cobb County, the margin was 69% to 31%.

    On election morning, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution featured opposing commentaries by regional planning agency (Atlanta Regional Commission) Chairman Tad Leithead and me. Chairman Leithead stressed the view that the tax would lead to reduced traffic congestion, job creation and economic development. My column stressed the view that the disproportionate spending on transit (53 percent of the money for one percent of the travel market) would not reduce traffic congestion.

  • America’s Future Is Taking Shape In The Suburbs

    For nearly a generation, pundits, academics and journalists have written off suburbia. They predict that the future lies in the cities, with more Americans living in smaller spaces such as the micro-apartments of 300 square feet or less that New York and San Francisco are considering changing their building laws to allow. Even traditionally spread out cities, such as Los Angeles, are laying out plans to create greater population density, threatening the continued existence of some neighborhoods of single-family homes.

    Yet wishing something dead does not make it so. Indeed, the suburbanization of America is likely to continue over the next decade. The 2010 Census — by far the most accurate recent accounting — showed that over 90% of all metropolitan growth over the past decade took place in the suburbs.

    Some central cities, notably New York, enjoyed decent population growth, but their increases were still below the national average. The Joint Center for Housing at Harvard notes that, only five metro areas —Boston, San Diego, San Jose, Calif., and the Florida cities of Cape Coral and Palm Bay — saw an increase in the share of households living in core cities relative to their suburbs and exurbs.

    To be sure, the Great Recession slowed the growth of suburbs, as many Americans lost the ability to achieve their dream of owning a single-family house. “Back to the city” advocates have seized on Census estimates for the past year that suggested that urban core growth has actually been a tad faster than that of suburbs.

    However, the Census Bureau numbers may be less accurate, and certainly less predictive, than many suggest. University of Pittsburgh urban analyst Chris Briem points out that in the last decade, some Census Bureau city estimates turned out to be vastly exaggerated compared to the actual 2010 Census. This was particularly true in Chicago and New York, where constant lobbying by city officials — after all, federal aid is distributed based on population estimates — meant that optimistic urban estimates turned out to be hundreds of thousands of people off.

    More amazing still, the Census Bureau essentially assumed that growth was even in all municipalities in a county. This bizarre practice projects that growth, say, in the city of Los Angeles, is equal to that of newer communities like Santa Clarita, or that suburbs of Alleghany County grew at the same rate as the city of Pittsburgh. This surely can’t be the case.

    Reporters concentrated in Manhattan and the District of Columbia didn’t look seriously at these numbers. They repeated the assumption that this was the result of mass migration, particularly among the young, out of suburbs and into cities.

    Yet in reality, there was no evidence of that trend. In fact, the Census Bureau’s core county estimates (which are demonstrably more accurate than the municipal estimates) showed a slight core county loss in domestic migration over the past year. The real story of the estimates has to do with the recession, which has led to record-low levels of mobility. Inter-county migration has fallen almost half from its 2006 level. Essentially, a historically weak economy has boosted the city share of population growth.

    So what can we expect in the future? Some cities will grow, but the vast majority of metropolitan growth will continue to take place in what are still car-dominated suburbs like areas areas. This can occur only the economy again get on a full-fledged growth cycle. Here some basic reasons not to write off suburbia.

    Inter-Regional Growth Patterns

    All 15 of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas of the past decade — led by places like Las Vegas, Raleigh, Phoenix, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth — are sprawling and have low-density cores. Metropolitan areas with far denser cores, such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, tended to display below-average growth.

    These fast-growing cities tend to be suburban in form, dominated by single-family homes, automobile commuters and with dispersed economic centers. The growing central cities of Phoenix or Houston look more like places such as Long Island or Santa Clara than Manhattan or Chicago.

    Economic Shifts

    Many urban boosters cite a Santa Fe Institute study claiming that density creates productivity and economic growth. However, the study clearly dissociated itself from this argument, claiming that it did not matter if a region was shaped like Los Angeles, Atlanta or Houston, or New York or Boston. The source of productivity lay simply in a growing metropolitan population, the authors claimed.

    Overall, it’s questionable whether city economies perform better over time than the suburbs. Indeed, over the last decade, 81 percent of the population growth of core cities was among the poor, compared to 32 percent in suburbs. Poverty anywhere is a bad thing, but the claim, made repeatedly by some pundits that it is worsening more in suburbs turns out to be, well, just another urban legend. Overall poverty accounts for nearly one in four urban residents, twice the rate for suburbs.

    Energy Costs

    Ever since the energy crisis of the 1970s, pundits have predicted suburbanites would be forced to give up their cars. But higher energy prices have not slowed the suburban trend. With the current growth in new energy finds both here and abroad, the much heralded dawn of “peak oil” appears to be about as imminent as a balanced federal budget.

    Some terrified urbanists, like Bruce Fisher, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at Buffalo State College, fear the new oil rush means “suburban real estate development will once again enjoy a comparative advantage over center city development.” In what some see as a catastrophe for both planet and urbanity, the car will remain dominant for the foreseeable future, despite three decades of massive spending on new transit systems across the country.

    Demographic Trends

    The advocates of a dense urban future usually point to demographics. Yet the formerly fashionable theory that retiring boomers would head en masse to cities turned out to be largely false. The last census showed the vast majority of aging boomers remained in the suburbs or moved further out into the periphery. “Back to the country” actually far outweighed “back to the city” in terms of boomer migration.

    Then there’s the other large generation of Americans, millennials, who are said to prefer an urban lifestyle. Yet surveys of millennials show a strong, often even more marked, preference for homeownership and suburban living than their parents.

    This will prove critical as many now urban millennials begin to enter their 30s and 40s over the next decade. Once they marry and start to have families, they will emerge, as the Harvard housing study notes as “the primary driver of new household formations over the next two decades.” Along with the other powerful force, immigrants, most seem likely to end up in suburban locales, if they can.

    Preferences Matter

    This does not counteract the fact that many young people will chose to settle in dense urban areas for their 20s and early 30s. Some urban cores, notably New York, Boston and San Francisco, will likely grow and get denser. But most others will see only modest, often fitful growth; despite massive public investment, for example, downtown Los Angeles, according to Zillow.com, has foreclosure rates worse than virtually anywhere else in the region.

    Preferences are the key here, particularly paying attention to what people want as they age. The 2011 Community Preference Survey, commissioned jointly by the National Association of Realtors and Smart Growth America, found that only a small minority — less than 10 percent — favored a dense urban location. Some 80 percent expressed preference for a single-family home.

    Over time, in a market-based economy, consumer preferences matter far more than those of pundits, professors or, for that matter, rent-seeking real estate developers. The only things that can kill off future suburban development would be forced densification by government edict or a continued miserable economy that entraps millions of the unwilling in dense urban areas.

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

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Suburbs photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

  • China Personal Vehicles Now More than US

    China Web quotes the nation’s Ministry of Public Security to the effect that China’s personal vehicle fleet (automobiles and motorcycles) reached 217 million at the end of June. This would place China ahead of the United States, which had approximately 200 million personal vehicles in 2010 and led the world for perhaps for most, if not all of the last century.

    China has 114 million automobiles and 103 million motorcycles, a substantially different mix than in the more affluent United States. The US has 192 million automobiles and 8 million motorcycles.

    Motorcycles are particularly useful in China’s growing and congested cities and are the logical stepping stone for buyers who are likely to eventually own cars. Many of the motorcycles are "E-Bikes," which use a plug-in battery operated technology. These motorcycles are so fuel efficient that their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per passenger kilometer approximate those of a full bus.

    In 2011, China also took the lead in freeway mileage, displacing the US. The United States, with its interstate highway system had led the world in freeway mileage for at least one-half century.

  • stability control system

  • Libor: Is The City of London Fixed?

    Having worked inside banking, do I think that banks colluded to post an artificial London interbank offered rate, otherwise known as Libor? For those not in the brotherhood, that acronym is a compendium of average borrowing prices from sixteen large banks, pronounced either as lee-boar or lie-bore. Before turning to conspiracy theories, let’s review the facts of a scandal that began more than four years ago, and are so murky that I, for one — despite twenty-five years in international banking — have a hard time grasping.

    In 2008, around the time of the September panic, Barclays and perhaps other large banks began obfuscating the true costs of their interbank borrowing, and submitted rates to the “fix” (in all senses of the word) that were less than their actual cost of funds. Why?

    Few creditors wanted to take a chance on leaving their deposits in large European or American banks, especially since so many, such as Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide, and the UK’s Northern Rock were shuttering their branch windows.

    Only by paying over the market rates could banks like Barclays fund their bloated balance sheets of subprime assets. (Big banks in 2008 were more like pyramid schemes.) If the market got wind of their true borrowing costs, it would have eroded what little confidence was left in the banking system. Barclays and the British government concocted (shall we say colluded?) to post rates to the Libor “fix” that did not reflect the bank’s actual cost of borrowing funds.

    As in Olympic scoring, when setting the Libor the highs and lows are thrown out, leaving the financial world with an approximation of what big banks pay to borrow from each other. When big banks actually trade with each other, however, they have to pay what they agree to with their creditors, not the Libor rates printed in the Wall Street Journal.

    In 2008, Barclays was paying over Libor. The British government was helping it to cover its wobbly funding tracks in the interest of showing the financial world that London banks were solid and creditworthy.

    Before this shell game, there was the another leg of the current scandal. From about 2005 onward, Barclays and others had been posting artificially high interbank borrowing costs, so that borrowers across the world would be paying higher benchmark rates on their loans and derivative contracts, valued in the trillions of dollars.

    The reasons are easy to calculate. Imagine that the world’s big banks can borrow from each other at 2%, but that they secretly agree to establish a Libor benchmark rate of 2.5%. The fifty basis points are pure profit to anyone funding loans at 2%, and then charging a margin on top of 2.5%.

    If true, Libor’s three-card Monte could have drained a reported $22 billion from unwitting borrowers. Nevertheless, while cabalistic traders were feathering their plush-carpeted nests, global regulators were also willing accomplices to the large banks in these rigged markets.

    After the crash, institutions like the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank were desperate to recapitalize the banking system. The presumed results would be to improve the profitability of the banks, and make them less dependent on state funding.

    In fixing Libor, both high and low, Barclays probably thought it was doing the king’s bidding. No wonder its $39-million-a-year Chairman Bob Diamond expected a knighthood rather than a pillory.

    If much of this finagling happened between 2005 and 2008, why are bankers now heading to jail for aiding and abetting their senior managements or the regulators? Why now the moral outrage, Senate hearings, presidential soundbites, indictments, hair shirts, resignations, and headlines that the banks have yet again stolen our money?

    Although in theory banks are credit institutions, at least according to their charters, in reality they are political interest groups that occasionally grant loans.

    Among the oldest arguments in American politics are those that center on whether the US should have national or just state banks, and whether the circulating currency should be tethered to some commodity (gold, silver, toasters) or allowed to float unhinged on world money markets, as they now do (Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility in 1971).

    Another divisive political argument has been whether banking and money should be beholden to big city interests (for example, robber baron J.P. Morgan) or to agricultural concerns (Andrew Jackson had them in mind). Morgan got rich on deflation when money was tied to gold; the farmers won with inflation because they could repay their loans with cheaper dollars.

    In Europe, the similar divide is between the propertied and working classes. In the Libor scandal, Barclays is synonymous with the remittance men in the House of Lords, living off coupons.

    Now on both continents, the political question is whether the financial system should be geared toward stimulus (cheaper money) or austerity (debt reduction; gold standards). In the US. election, Romney speaks for the hard money men while the Obama administration, like French President François Hollande, believes in fiat money with the revolutionary passions of Marat and Robespierre.

    Because both political blocs have their constituents and henchmen, Libor bankers are walking the plank for constricting the money supply, and spendthrift politicians are being turned out of office, charged with debasing the paper currency.

    Although the fine print of the outrage is obscure, Libor is at the subconscious center of the 2012 election and the future of Europe. No wonder headline writers and prosecutors are rounding up the usual banking suspects.

    The soundbite storyboards are perfect for a prime-time, election-season docudrama, starring greedy bankers, virtuous senators, victimized home owners who were bilked out of billions in a scam hatched in City of London pubs and carried out in corner offices.

    On the campaign trail the President could be heard to imply that plutocratic, Republican supporters of Mitt Romney are hand-in-black-glove with the rate fixers. The message is clear. The reason the world’s economies are in recession is not incompetent economic policies, but collusion between Wall Street and its UK counterpart, the City of London.

    In other words, the banking system has fulfilled its historic political mandate: to give every presidential election “a good, safe menace,” so that nervous voters can cast their ballots to keep the moneychangers away from the temples of democracy, even though they need a billion in soft money to light the altar candles.

    Flickr Photo by Garry Knight – The Dragon from the City of London’s coat of arms, cast as a statue.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His next book is Whistle-Stopping America.

  • Michael Taus

  • Density is Not the Issue: The Urban Scaling Research

    The "urban scaling" research of Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, Dirk Helbing and Christian Kuhnert on cities has attracted considerable attention (references below). They have provided strong quantitative evidence, based upon voluminous econometric analysis that cities tend to become more efficient as they grow in population.

    Specifically, West, a theoretical physicist, and his team show that measures such as gross domestic product per capita and income per capita rise, on average, 15 percent with each doubling of city population. They draw parallels with the animal kingdom, noting that larger animals tend to be more efficient than smaller ones, and comparing elephants, efficient because of their size, to cities.

    This is all very attractive, especially the elephant analogy, which appropriately suggests that cities are organisms.

    The Urban Organism

    Yet the research has been widely reported to suggest that density as opposed to size is the key to urban productivity. West et al look at cities as "integrated economic and social units," at the "level of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs); in the European Union, larger urban zones (LUZs); and in China, urban administrative units." This is the economic, or functional manifestation of the urban organism (the urban area, the area of continuous urbanization, is the physical manifestation). In so doing, West, et al demonstrate a familiarity with urban geography that is all too rare, even among analysts who have studied cities for far longer.

    The key issue here is what constitutes a “city”.  New York is a good, example, as headquarters to the national media, a world class city and as urban as it gets in the United States. But the New York metropolitan area, the "integrated economic and social unit" is not Manhattan or even five boroughs. It stretches from a bit west of Blooming Grove Township, in Pike County 25 miles west of Port Jervis, a city 90 miles from Manhattan located in western Orange County, NY, to Montauk Point in Suffolk County and from north of West Point, in Putnam County to Egg Harbor Township, in Ocean County, New Jersey (that’s nearly 30 miles south of Toms River). Suffice it to say most of this vast region is not dense at all.

    Divining Density

    Yet, some analysts have characterized the West, et al research as being about higher densities, Richard Florida wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

    Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have been able to demonstrate that bigger, denser cities literally speed up the metabolism of daily life.

    That’s only half right. The research was about city size, not density, as the authors indicate (below).

    All too typical of the way that suburbanized America is disparaged by the media, Jonah Lehrer, of The New York Times sputtered that:

    In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences.

    In reality, the kind of suburbs found in Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino will be found surrounding every one of the nation’s core cities, including New York, an urban area that covers  more land area than any urban area in the world at 3,450 square miles (8,935 square kilometers), according to the Census Bureau. That’s twice the expanse of the Los Angeles urban area. Granted, New York’s Hudson Valley suburbs are greener and more affluent than most in Phoenix, but their population density is nearly the same. Moreover, neither Phoenix nor New York (think Staten Island or much of Long Island) should be ashamed of attracting "working class families who want their own white picket fences." Why demean aspiration?

    Urban blogger James Withow refers to their "remarkable findings" that "raise interesting policy issues on density." Another analyst wrote "West offers data that shows cities create economies of scale that suburbs and small towns cannot match." This is patently absurd since, as noted above, West did not study any part of the urban organism below the metropolitan area. There was no attempt to make a distinction between the productivity of say, Manhattan or Brooklyn, to White Plains or even Blooming Spring Township. No core city or suburb is an "integrated economic and social unit."

    West et al on Density

    Indeed, West et al make it very clear that their findings have nothing to do with urban population density. They tested for correlations population growth and income, patents and violent crimes, and found "no significant trend exists between residuals for income, patents and violent crime and population growth or density." They further note their equations showed an "R2 consistent with zero" (in every day English, that means they found no relationship between density and the other variables).

    This conclusion was correct, though comparing metropolitan area densities is less than ideal. Just to check, we reran the equations with urban density data and found that this approach too produced an "R2 consistent with zero," not only for income, patents and violent crimes, but also gross metropolitan product.

    West et al pointed out that:

    The shape of the city in space, including for example its residential density, matter much less than (and are mostly accounted for by) population size in predicting indicators of urban performance. Said more explicitly, whether a city looks more like New York or Boston or instead like Los Angeles or Atlanta has a vanishing effect in predicting its socio-economic performance. (emphasis by author)

    In other words, the same improvement in urban performance would be predicted from doubling the population of Atlanta, with an urban density of 1,700 per square mile (700 per square kilometer) as in New York, with more than three times Atlanta’s density or Los Angeles’ with more than four (Los Angeles is highest density large urban area in the United States).

     It turns out – counter the misunderstandings of some urbanists – that higher or lower density simply does not matter according to the West, et al research.

    It’s About Density Thresholds and Efficient Labor Markets

    Cities (integrated economic and social units) are created by reaching urban density thresholds. They tend to become more productive as they grow, so long as they are not too large to function as a labor market. Density doesn’t matter particularly. Indeed, the general tendency is for cities to become more dispersed (less dense) as they grow, as indicated by longer term data in the US, Canada and around the world.

    For example, the Seattle and Houston urban areas have population densities much lower than those of Paris, London, Hong Kong and even Los Angeles – yet they still rank higher among the most productive metropolitan areas in the world, according to the Brookings Institution Global Metropolitan Monitor 2011. Brookings rates Hartford as the most productive metropolitan area in the world, yet its urban population density is nearly as low as Atlanta’s.

    Finally, the Brookings list excludes the world’s most dense major city, Dhaka. That’s because the economic output of its 15 million people is insufficient to make a list that includes cities one-tenth its size. Dhaka combines the highest population density in the world with perhaps the lowest per capita economic output of any megacity in the world.

    Allowing Organisms to Grow

    As West et al suggests, cities, like elephants, are organisms. Both expand (dare we say "sprawl") as they grow. This should be cause for concern, given planning dictates that would restrain urban organism, such as urban growth boundaries. These restraints are akin to depriving a large mammal of sufficient space to roam and feed. That’s no way to treat a productive organism, or a great city.

    ——-

    Reference Materials:
    Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
    Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities
    2010 US Urban Area Data

    ——-

    African Bush Elephant photo by flickr user nickandmel2006.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Predictable Punditry Down Under

    The New South Wales Government has been following an extreme version of currently fashionable planning doctrines based on higher population densities. These policies have resulted in exorbitant housing costs and increasing traffic congestion.  A Liberal/National Coalition Government has come into power in New South Wales, replacing the previous Labor Government. In its election platform it promised to change planning policies for the better. These include fewer additional dwellings to be forced into Sydney suburbs, more fringe land release, decentralisation and giving planning powers back to the community.

    The New South Wales Department of Planning bureaucracy is consequently ostensibly devising a new housing strategy.  As the main feature in a community discussion on this new strategy, the Department organised a presentation by Harvard Professor Edward Glaeser in Sydney entitled “Triumph of the City”, The promotional description read

    “recognised as the world’s leading urban economist, Harvard University’s Professor Edward Glaeser, along with four of NSW Government’s planning and infrastructure experts, will discuss fresh approaches to meeting Sydney’s biggest challenge now and into the future — planning for a population that is expected to increase from 4.2 million to more than 5.6 million by 2031”.

    Previous consultation exercises for planning strategies had proved to be tokenistic and mere public relations exercises.  Unfortunately this event proved to be no exception. It promoted the current high-density policies with no discussion of alternatives or fresh approaches.

    Professor Glaeser spoke about how cities evolved as engines of development and wealth creation. He portrayed cities facilitating people getting together, sharing ideas and building on previous innovations. He described how the advent of popular means of transport — from horse drawn transport to cars — allowed cities to spread and maintained that low density areas are associated with longer car journeys and larger homes that consume more energy. To facilitate the person to person contact he considers necessary to sustain innovation and to reduce energy consumption he advocated ever higher-densities closer to the city core.   

    He implied this is especially important so as to set an example to highly populated China and India in order to limit the otherwise huge escalation in energy usage in those countries.

    Throughout the proceedings the conference facilitator promoted the concept of high densities by such statements as “We need to re-examine the suburban model, living more like urban model” and “Go up, not out.  Can we do that? How do we do that?”
    The overwhelming impression given by the consultation proceedings was that high-density is the only possible strategy worth considering and that Glaeser’s USA perspective can be applied to New South Wales.

    Yet the argument that high density means more innovation seems flawed. In the United States of America the greatest innovative activity takes place not in crowded Manhattan but in regions of densities similar to that of Sydney, the urban area of which has 2100 persons per square kilometre (5,500 per square mile).  The San Jose urban area in Silicon Valley, with a similar population density, has a booming world-changing local technology industry including Cisco Systems and IBM. It also is almost totally dependent on automobiles, with only a small share of people taking transit.

    Companies operating in Hillsboro in the Portland urban area (population density of 1400 per square kilometre or 3600 per square mile) include Yahoo!, Credence Systems, Synopsys, Epson and Sun Microsystems.  Seattle, the home of Microsoft and the initiation of Boeing, has a population density of 1,200 per square kilometre, or 3,000 per square mile. The densities in these dynamic areas are equal to or less than that of Sydney and a far cry from the Manhattan or even Hong Kong type of density of 25,000 (67,000 per square mile) or more that Glaeser seems to prefer.

    Although high-density living may not be for everyone, apparently, particularly those with kids. Glaeser, like another prominent advocate of rapid densification, David Owen “copes” with living in suburbia.  I guess dense housing is for other families.

    The claim by Glaeser that high-density is superior environmentally also is not borne out in Australian studies.  A publication of his finds emissions in low-density suburbs in several United States cities to be higher than in high-density suburbs.  Australian data does not show this.

    A study of energy-related emissions at the final point of consumption finds per capita energy usage in a group of low density Sydney suburbs (96 GJ per annum) to be lower than in high-density suburbs (169 GJ).  One of several factors accounting for these differences is there are more people per household in the lower density areas. Glaeser models emissions on a “standard household” of 2.2 people; many, if not most suburban households, have more than that number, although city households frequently don’t.  One wonders whether possible differences in the number of people per dwelling in high-density and low-density areas can be adequately catered for in such models.

    For another thing, the Australian climate is very different and that is probably a significant reason for higher densities to be more energy intensive. If dwellings are too close they are more difficult to cool whereas it is easier to heat them.  Also, cooling technically needs more energy than heating as a much larger volume of air needs to be circulated (NOTE 1).

    Glaeser’s advocacy of high-density to reduce transport emissions needs special consideration.  In Australia such reduction, if any, is trivial.  Transport greenhouse gas emissions account for only a small proportion of household emissions and higher-densities reduce these to a minimal extent. (NOTE 2) 

    It is not only in Australia where evidence for significant environmental benefits from high-density planning is lacking.  As a result of studies testing the relative performance of spatial options in England, Echenique et al conclude: “The current planning policy strategies for land use and transport have virtually no impact on the major long-term increases in resource and energy consumption. They generally tend to increase costs and reduce economic competitiveness. The relatively small differences between options are over-whelmed by the impacts of socioeconomic change and population growth”.

    The Department of Planning-sponsored Glaeser presentation was not a genuine consultation. It promoted existing government policies with no attempt to consider their downside or to discuss alternatives.  It is extraordinary and downright arrogant to expect Sydney communities to change their preferred mode of life to live in tiny apartments perched in towers (see picture) in the unproven expectation that this will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is yet even more extraordinary to presume that such a transformation would influence policies in China and India in any significant way. The days when these great countries looked to the West for models has already passed; and look where many people from these countries settle when they get to the United States or to Australia: the suburbs. Classic cases include the San Gabriel Valley East of Los Angeles, the Santa Clara Valley communities of Silicon Valley, large swaths of northern New Jersey and to Sydney’s North Shore in Australia.

    The proceedings proved to be an attempt to promote a particular point of view, so perpetuating previous approaches of trying to manipulate opinion in the guise of consultation.

    It appears clear that in spite of a change of government there will be no change in planning policies.  The new government looks like having been captured by the bureaucracy and its cult of densification that has no more chance of changing its views than the College of Cardinals is likely to eschew the Papacy. 

    (Dr) Tony Recsei has a background in chemistry and is an environmental consultant. Since retiring he has taken an interest in community affairs and is president of the Save Our Suburbs community group which opposes over-development forced onto communities by the New South Wales State Government.

    Photo: Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Public School Parent Trigger Laws: Something’s Gotta Give

    In the mid-1950s, the McGuire Sisters’ version of Johnny Mercer’s song about what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object made it to number five on the record charts. Their prediction, that “Something’s Gotta Give,” provides an apt description of the outcome of today’s battle between the parents of Millennials who want more say in their children’s education and the teacher unions and school district administrators who refuse to give up a smidgeon of control over the public schools they run.

    One of the hottest battle fronts in the war between these two forces has been debates over whether to adopt “Parent Trigger” laws, similar to those passed in California in 2010. Such legislation empowers the majority of parents in any school district deemed to be “failing,” according to the federal No Child Left Behind standards, to essentially reconstitute the school according to parents’ desires either by turning it into a charter school or removing and replacing all current teachers and administrators.

    Since 2010, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana have passed similar legislation and it is up for debate in major industrial states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York. In Florida, the idea came within one vote of passage in the State Senate thanks to the enthusiastic support of former Florida Republican Governor, Jeb Bush. At the same time, such Democratic stalwarts as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and liberal Congressman George Miller (D-CA) have expressed their strong support for the concept. Most recently, the bi-partisan U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution in support of Parent Trigger laws.  Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, chairman of both the Mayor’s Conference and the upcoming Democratic National Convention, led the charge for the resolution’s passage, aided by strong support from Democratic Mayors such as Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and Kevin Johnson of Sacramento.

    None of this has softened the resistance from teacher unions, historically a bulkwark of Democratic support. Often led by unreconstructed Boomer liberals from the 1960s, they see the law’s emphasis on parental prerogatives as the ultimate threat to their control of the classroom and educational budgets. In the most recent battle, unions were able to pressure Change.org, a for profit, grass roots website “staffed by some of the most talented progressive organizers in the country,”  to bar StudentsFirst, an advocacy group run by Democrat Michelle Rhee, the former Washington D.C. School Superintendent, that supports giving parents more control over the schools their children attend, from using its website.

    And when the chief press person for Parent Revolution, the non-profit that is the primary driver behind the adoption of Parent Trigger laws, was announced as the new education media spokesperson by Obama’s re-election campaign, teachers’ unions threatened to withhold their support of the president.

    In the long run, the implacable objections of the unions to parents having more say over the type of education their own children will fail. They will prove no match for the irresistible force of generational change that is already sweeping away existing institutional power structures in schools across the country.

    One of the distinguishing characteristics of Millennials, born 1982-2003, is the intense interest their parents take in every aspect of their children’s lives. This desire to constantly hover over their offspring earned parents of older Millennials (those now in their twenties) the sobriquet, “helicopter parents.” The younger half of the Millennial Generation, which  accounts for most elementary and all secondary school students today is primarily parented by members of the more entrepreneurial Generation X (born 1965-1981). These parents replaced their Boomer predecessors’ tendency to hover and talk with a desire to take action and change bottom-line results.

    Millennials are the largest, most diverse generation in American history, and many of them are now starting to have children of their own. When those children begin arriving in the nation’s schools, Millennial Generation parents will bring the same dedication that their own parents exhibited to making sure each school serves their child’s interests first.  As a result, it won’t be long before the same rights California, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana parents now have are given to every parent in the country. As Ben Austin, the founder of the Parent Revolution points out, “the old coalitions don’t apply here; it’s a cause that unites parents from upper-middle-class and working-class backgrounds—white, black, and Latino alike.”            

    The type of generational change America will experience over the next few decades   will drive the transformation of America’s educational institutions and overwhelm those who attempt to keep parents from deciding what kind of school their kids go to. When push comes to shove, something’s gotta give. And, in the end, that means that those who stand for the status quo in our nation’s schools will have to give up their traditional prerogatives and let parents choose the educational experience they think is best for their own children.  

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics and fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

    School bus photo by BigStockPhoto.com.