Contributor Blog

I had heard of “dense sprawl” and “density without walkability” in the past, but before spending a week in Jerusalem last month, I had never really lived through these problems.

My parents (who I was staying with) rented a unit in a high-rise condo complex called Holyland Tower.  Although Holyland Tower was the tallest building in the area, there were numerous mid-rise buildings, and lots of two-and three-story apartment and condo buildings.  While walking through the idea, I saw nothing resembling a single-family home.  In sum, this area was a pretty dense neighborhood in a pretty dense city (Jerusalem’s overall density is roughly comparable to that of the city of San Francisco).

After reading this story about a transit agency surveying their customers, I thought to myself: do riders really want another survey asking whether they are satisfied or how clean the stations are?  Although clean stations are certainly better than unclean stations, I suspect that these are not transit riders' major priorities.  (And when I say "transit riders" I really of course mean "myself").

After reading an article on the misuse of CEQA in California,* I took a short look at New York law.  In New York, city planners must prepare an environmental assessment when property is rezoned, and must prepare a more detailed environmental impact statement (EIS) if property has a significant effect on the environment.  

Before moving to New York, I'd viewed street design through a fairly simple lens: narrow streets good, wide streets bad.  By and large, I still hold this view.  But after living here for a few months, I have learned that not all wide streets are equally bad.   The wide roads of the South are generally terrible, but New York has made some of its wide streets a bit more pedestrian-friendly.  To see why, go to Google Street View and examine three addresses: 5019 U.S. 23 in Chamblee, Georgia, 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, and 107-43 Queens Boulevard in my current Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills.

In a recent post, Todd Litman criticized the Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report.  In this post, I'd like to do something a little different: assume that TTI's congestion estimates are more or less reliable, and try to learn something from them.  So here are a few observations:

 

It is conventional wisdom in some circles that “comprehensive planning” and sprawl are polar opposites- that planning is the enemy of sprawl.

But in fact, a comprehensive plan is almost as likely as a zoning code to be pro-sprawl.  Many of the land use policies that make suburbs automobile-dependent (such as wide roads, long blocks, low density, single-use zoning, etc.) can just as easily be found in a comprehensive plan. 

A few months ago, I updated a city rating system (available at http://lewyn.tripod.com/livable09) that evaluated cities' "livability" by rating crime rates, transit-friendliness, and cost of housing.  

Plenty of cities did very well on the first two criteria.  For example, New York is now safer than most big cities, and of course is by far the best city in the U.S. for public transit.  But its housing costs are dreadfully high.  The same was true of Boston and San Francisco (which, if only crime and transit were considered, would rank second and third for livability).  

A few months ago, I was talking to a faculty colleague who lives in a part of Jacksonville even more sprawl-bound where I live, an area about a mile or so from the nearest bus stop and with a single-digit Walkscore.  He said Jacksonville was "safe and clean."  I was a little surprised: "clean" is one word I would never* use to describe Jacksonville.  When I walk down the sidewalks of San Jose Boulevard, I notice litter aplenty - and from what I know of Beach Boulevard (the grim commercial strip near my colleague's house) I doubt that it is much better.

Last week, I was busy trying to turn my paper on sprawl in Canada (available at http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/65/) into a speech.   In my paper, I define sprawl in two ways: where we grow (measured by growth or decline of central cities, controlling for municipal annexations) and how we grow (measured by modal shares for cars and transit).  As I was proofing, I asked myself: why these particular measurements?  What presuppositions underlie defining sprawl based on, say, modal share as opposed to the growth of a urban area's land mass?

The Brookings Institution's "State of Metropolitan America" database (at http://www.brookings.edu/metro/StateOfMetroAmerica/Map.aspx#/?subject=7&ind=70&dist=0&data=Number&year=2009&geo=metro&zoom=0&x=0&y=0 ) contains a wealth of information both on central cities and their metropolitan areas.  One issue I was curious about was the economic gap (or lack thereof) between cities and their suburbs.

I recently finished reading Foreclosing the Dream, by William Lucy. The most interesting parts of this book are the first chapter and the last appendix, both of which tell us where foreclosures are (or at least were in 2008, before the foreclosure crisis morphed into an international economic downturn). These figures seem to me to debunk at least a couple of the more popular explanations of the foreclosure crisis, such as:

Myth 1: "Its all the fault of too much lending to the urban poor."

Census data is already in for a couple of dozen states, and already blogs are starting to speculate about their lessons for American cities.  Some commentators look at the continued decline of Rust Belt cities like Chicago and St. Louis, and suggest that suburban sprawl continues (and will forever continue) unabated.  But reality is not quite so simple.

My sense is that most new urbanists and smart growth advocates were happy to see Barack Obama elected President two years ago.  While John McCain opposed Amtrak and had not been overly supportive of local public transit, Obama created an Administration full of advocates for transit and urbanism, and high-speed rail is one of his Administration's signature programs.  So the Obama Administration will slow sprawl, and will make our cities more transit-oriented, prosperous and walkable.   Right? 

I spent the last two weeks of December in Atlanta, living (mostly) with my parents.  My life in Atlanta is much more car-dependent than my life in Jacksonville; in the latter city, I live a block from a bus stop, while in Atlanta, I live at least a mile from the nearest bus stop (and more importantly, near no sidewalks to take me to said bus stop).  So naturally, I drove everywhere in Atlanta.

And while driving, I noticed a couple of unusual things.  First, I noticed that unlike in my Jacksonville neighborhood, bicyclists actually tried to ride on the street rather than on sidewalks.*  Second, I noticed that I was beginning to get annoyed with bicyclists- to a much greater extent than I have ever been annoyed with pedestrians while driving.

As Congress begins to draft transportation legislation next year, fiscal scarcity may induce a fight between transit and highway advocates over federal funding, rather than the cooperation of the last few years.  And if highway advocates seek to tear down federal support for other forms of transportation, they will probably rely heavily on federalism considerations, arguing that highways are inherently an interstate concern while transit and non-motorized forms of transportation are a nonfederal concern.  For example, Alan Pisarski writes: “If sidewalks and bike paths are federal then everything is federal.”

There are two flaws in this argument.  First of all, highways are not always primarily an interstate concern

In a recent blog post,(1) highway expert Alan Pisarski suggests that highway-oriented sprawl development is somehow necessary for the development of modern labor markets.(2) Pisarski writes that regional job markets are jobs are more specialized today than they were in his youth, and labor markets are thus "of immense size because many [highly specialized] employers need a market of hundreds of thousands of potential workers to reach the ones they need. The Atlanta region of 26 counties is not a great economic engine because it is 26 charming adjacent hamlets, but rather because the market reach of employers, suppliers, customers and job seekers spreads over several million residents."

While critiquing one of my blog posts, Prof. Randall Crane asked: "Is any parking regulation a net social burden or only 1.75 spaces per Jacksonville, Florida apartment?" This question in turn is an example of a broader question: how do we resolve an issue when we don’t know, and perhaps have no way of knowing, the ideal empirical answer?

Parking regulation presents a classic example: looking at environmental harm alone, it seems to me clear that minimum parking requirements create some environmental harm by on balance encouraging driving, but also reduce environmental harm from "cruising" (motorists wasting time and fuel searching for parking spaces).*

Every so often, I read something describing defenders of sprawl as "contrarians", implying that they are underdogs fighting against the elitist, anti-sprawl Establishment. For example, when I did a google.com search for sites including Robert Bruegmann (author of one of the better defenses of the status quo) and the word "contrarian" I found over 1400 "hits."  Similarly, a search for websites using the terms "smart growth" and "elitist" yielded over 6000 hits.

But realistically, most of the U.S. built environment is sprawl by any concievable definition. So how can it be "contrarian" to defend the status quo?

When you buy a house, you might think that you are in control of that house and its value.  But in reality, your house’s value depends on a wide variety of factors beyond your control, such as the perceived desirability of your neighbors, local highway and transit policies, and trends in national and regional housing markets.  Your home may be your castle in a physical sense- but its value is heavily affected by what goes on outside the residential setting.

In her new book The Unbounded Home, University of Chicago law professor Lee Fennell addresses the implications of this reality and of homeowners’ attempts to reassert control over property values through restrictive covenants and zoning.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to a friend explain why she left Rochester for Jacksonville. "I was tired of digging my car out of the snow." It occurred to me that the nexus between driving and winter weather may at least partially explain the decline of America’s northern Rust Belt.

Here’s why: car care and storage makes snow a bigger bother than might otherwise be the case: if you don’t have a heated garage, you have to dig your car out of the snow every day, and if you park on the street you may have to constantly move your car to accommodate municipal snow removal.