It was just a fleeting moment amid the hours of presidential debate that have taken place through this longest of election cycles, but it nonetheless warmed my heart. No-longer-a-candidate Bill Richardson, in response to a question on climate policy, said of the fight against climate change:
It's going to take a transportation policy that doesn't just build more highways. We have to have commuter rail, light rail, open spaces. We've got to have land-use policies where we improve people's quality of life.
The remark was all but ignored by the Democratic front-runners, and was greeted by pundits with praise or disdain, depending upon their ideological stripe, before being once again set aside in favor of discussion on sexier issue areas.
But Richardson had hit upon a truly pressing matter, one which deserves the attention of federal policy makers. Transportation accounts for a third of all carbon dioxide emissions in this country. Moreover, concerns about gas prices, congestion, housing costs, and other related urban ills loom large in the lives of Americans, if not necessarily in political debates. We should be having a discussion about the way in which we build and grow our cities, the costs of our current approach, and what the federal government can do to fix what's broken.
The great shift towards sprawl began early last century with the growth of streetcar suburbs and the rise of personal automobile ownership, but it accelerated significantly during the massive road-construction boom of the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, outward migration was primarily driven by shifts in transportation costs. The growth of new highways allowed commuters to quickly and easily travel from their home in the suburbs to a central business district. Suburbanization fed on itself, as outward migration bled urban tax bases dry, leading to crime, failing public services, and bankruptcy for once-proud central cities.
In recent decades, sprawl has been driven forward primarily by housing cost pressures. As economist Ed Glaeser has convincingly shown, older, denser neighborhoods and cities tend to regulate new housing construction tightly, restricting supply growth and pushing up housing prices. New neighborhoods built on pristine land in outlying counties are subject to far looser rules. In many exurban counties, new neighborhoods require little more than the purchase of a large parcel of farmland and the rubber stamp of a small government development board. It's easy to add new housing supply on the margins of great cities, which keeps housing prices relatively low and attracts a steady flow of migrants from high cost areas of the country.
Sprawl is nonetheless supported by transportation infrastructure. It's more difficult to build infrastructure of any kind in dense areas than in exurbs; land is harder to obtain and more expensive, and potential opponents more numerous. This dynamic is reinforced by federal funding priorities. Highway money is plentiful and comes with few strings attached, while transit funding is limited and contingent upon approval by the Federal Transit Administration, which rigorously reviews and critiques -- and frequently dictates revisions to -- applicant plans.
The result is a world where exurban, low-density growth is cheap, easy, and incredibly common. The outcome of this state of affairs is striking. The nation's fastest growing counties are overwhelmingly located in the exurbs of large cities -- places like Loudoun County (Washington, D.C.), Kendall County (Chicago), Rockwall County (Dallas), and Pinal County (Phoenix), all of which have grown in population by more than 50 percent since the 2000 census. Metropolitan areas where growth almost exclusively follows the suburban form have experienced population explosions in recent years. Since 2000, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix have all added between 750,000 and 1 million people each. And the regional implications are extreme. Since the 2000 census, the southern and western portions of the country have grown by nearly 17 million people. The Northeast and Midwest, by contrast, added just under 3 million.
This population shift has been viewed as a triumph by many economic observers and political leaders. Empty land and sleepy, economically stagnant small cities have given way to metropolitan juggernauts. States that once emptied their pockets in attempts to lure northern manufacturers to their underemployed towns now find themselves awash in jobs, many of them good ones. Northern families hit hard by the decline of rust belt manufacturing have experienced new economic lives in the south and west, and northern households that couldn't afford to buy homes near their jobs despite excellent salaries find themselves in expansive estates on the outskirts of places like Charlotte, Atlanta, and Houston.
These booming states, and the nation as a whole, are beginning to understand that these massive migrations are not without significant costs. Budgets in the south and west have been stretched tight with the burden of massive new infrastructure construction. Heavy dependence on automobile commuting has led to epidemic congestion. And recent implosions in some local housing markets, particularly those in southern California and Florida, have forced some to question the strength of the economic fundamentals underpinning the population boom.
Ultimately, those concerns could prove to be small potatoes relative to other potential challenges. The sun-belt shift has meant millions of new people in areas subject to extreme drought, wild fires, hurricanes, and flooding, at precisely the time when scientists expect such events to become less predictable and more severe. The population shift itself isn't helping, as these migrations have generally meant the relocation of families from denser areas with better transit options to low-density neighborhoods where transit is practically unheard of, leading to increased fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions. On a number of key traffic indicators (PDF), including delays per traveler and wasted fuel per traveler due to congestion, cities like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix perform far worse than cities like Chicago and New York, despite significantly smaller populations.
And while commuters in New York and Chicago can shift (and have shifted, impressively) from driving to transit as gas prices rise, residents of autocentric towns in the south and west cannot, and are therefore forced to swallow high fuel costs. If the U.S. manages to adopt carbon limiting rules, as it should, long automobile commutes will become more expensive still; as such, the massive southward migration based on low-density development will make emission reductions more difficult and more painful. It may also make them less likely, since consumers will have a strong incentive to fight new costs they can't easily avoid.
The problem, then, is not the migration itself but some of the chief forces driving it. Mobility based on better economic opportunities is important for the economic health of the country. Mobility based on inefficient housing supply restrictions, on an inefficient distribution of transportation funding, and on underpriced carbon emissions, congestion, and environmental risks is a different beast altogether. It's an unhelpful mobility that is creating and will continue to generate large future costs. It's a mobility that the government should address with improved land-use and transportation policies.
Substantial improvements in federal policies aren't all that difficult to imagine or implement. I would recommend the following steps:
- First and foremost, the US should adopt a nationwide plan to price carbon emissions. Emission pricing would reduce the incentive to build and live in homes and cities which depend upon long automobile commutes.
- The federal government should eliminate the distinction between funding for highways and funding for transit. Doing so would significantly increase the pool of money available for transit, and it would make it easier for cities and states to allocate transportation money to transit priorities. A better distribution of funding will enable dense growth to continue where it's bound by inadequate infrastructure.
- The above steps, while necessary, will nonetheless do little to change the regulatory framework on the ground, which makes it easy to build homes in exurbs and difficult to add housing units in dense cities. To alter this dynamic, the federal government should make transportation and housing funding dependent upon growth in density. This would encourage local governments in highly regulated cities to confront interests opposed to new dense growth by arguing that density must be increased in order to qualify for needed federal funds. At the same time, local governments in loosely regulated cities should be hesitant to authorize massive new low-density developments, since responsibility for new infrastructure funding will then fall exclusively on local budgets. Sunbelt towns can continue to grow and thrive so long as new developments aren't exclusively outward oriented and automobile dependent.
The goal of these proposals is not to impede the free movement of labor, but to ensure that when jobs and people move from place to place, the driving force is not low costs made possible by cheap, dirty, and unsustainable uses of land. Competition between metropolitan areas should not be based around an environmental race to the bottom.
It's incredibly unfortunate that land-use and transportation issues are given such short shrift on the left and are merely fodder for jokes on the right. These are forces leading to the movement of tens of millions of Americans, completely altering the urban geography of the country. Those alterations have led to billions of dollars of losses due to congestion, massive new vulnerabilities to natural disasters, steady increases in carbon emissions from transportation and in the expected future cost of reducing those emissions. It's serious, serious business, and we leave these matters on the political sideline at our peril.
More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar
Comments
View as Flat
David Roberts Posted 6:46 am
14 Jan 2008
grist.org
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:00 am
14 Jan 2008
You just made my day.
Thanks, at least I got that off my chest.
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Ryan Avent Posted 7:10 am
14 Jan 2008
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Sam Wells Posted 7:14 am
14 Jan 2008
Then I had to smile thinking that we should rely on the Fed to solve such a complicated issue, as they would probably ruin everything, create another bureaucracy, charge people more taxes for little benefit, and claim they "solved" the problem.
Finally, there is a bit of "chicken and the egg" rationale about suburban sprawl. True, the Interstate Highway System did allow increased motor transportation throughout vast parts of the nation. However, what happened was that people took a detour down little two lane roads and built or bought houses. As these clumps of houses increased, the small dirt and two-lane paved roads had to become major arterials, often at the expense of the county and state. These improved highways allowed more access and volume, which in turn put stress on the Interstate Highways. See how that works? It is not as simple as "build it and they will come." Austin, TX is living proof.
That said, it's a shame Bill Richardson left the race. Good man.
Onward through the fog
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bookerly Posted 11:57 am
14 Jan 2008
Let's add to the demand part of the cycle. Give huge tax credits to people who live in small square footage spaces and dense urban areas.
(If you like penalties, penalize those who don't by limiting the tax deductibility of their mortgages, and add luxury taxes to their property tax rates (with the money going to help pay for the tax credits)).
Imagine if people who lived in urban small square footage housing got say $10,000 a year each. (Strict rent control would have to be in place, or another penalty system to keep greedy landlords from gobbling it all up from those who rent.)
A lot of people might think very hard about how they want to live.
Now add similar credits for those who don't own cars.
Spend money to provide good schools. Make neighborhoods safer (the credits would help with that!). Look at different models of density. In Beijing, people build up, but have open space around the buildings, so it is dense, but doesn't feel so dense.
If the government really got serious about this, there are lots of creative answers to the problems.
patrick in Beijing
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Elena Posted 11:34 pm
14 Jan 2008
Proper land use planning for disaster-prone regions, and having real free market insurance would help reduce sprawl into places like coastal Florida. Stop the government (taxpayer)insurance subsidies for those who want to live in these regions and you will considerably slow or maybe stop some of this sprawl.
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Sam Wells Posted 1:07 am
15 Jan 2008
I've blogged about this several times, noting that insurance increased in price although there were fewer coastal properties and no damaging hurricanes the last two years. Trust me, the effect of insurance is intense ... when something bad does happen, payments are based on value and not the actual policy limit. That is why so many houses in Louisiana and Florida still have those "Wal-Mart roofs" of blue plastic tarps.
I see opposing forces in the "Coastal Insurance Wars." One is the states, which are trying to lower insurance rates and make them more available to existing consumers. The other are the federal agencies involved in flood zone mapping. Many coastal flood maps are being revised to reflect new datum (erosion, subsidence, better science) and failing infrastructure. My thinking is that the Fed will eventually win that war ...
Onward through the fog
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:20 am
15 Jan 2008
Translation:
Wealthy old blue state in-urbians want to impose taxes on new red state sub-urbians. They therefore invent "global warming" as an excuse to take down the exurban lifestyle and enslave its citizens. The exurbians respond by electing George Bush.
This is the new civil war.
My Log
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:55 am
15 Jan 2008
Manhattan has become ridiculously expensive, but in order to solve that mess, there really would have to be well-thought-out apartment complexes. And the public schools near those complexes would have to be high-quality as well. Right now, when an apartment building goes up, it inevitably seems to be "luxury", read, too expensive for the middle class. I don't know if the city government, maybe with Federal funding, can work with developers to build enough new housing, which after all seems to be at the core of Ryan's narrative of why it's easier to sprawl than to build in cities.
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GonzoDon Posted 3:32 am
15 Jan 2008
I just don't want to see those ex-urbanites come crying to me about their $12/gallon gasoline. Sure, they'll be mad as hell and looking for somebody to blame. But heaven forbid that anyone should blame their dilemma on their own behavior.
I vote for tax breaks for those who consume less, drive less, and have fewer children.
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Alex 77 Posted 4:55 am
15 Jan 2008
It defies me why Grist allows him to post here, as each of his postings contain a link to his blog, containing ever more of his drivel. And of course his blog asks for donations from readers, should someone feel intellectually enriched enough to pay jabailo for his trash.
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Steve Erickson Posted 6:22 am
15 Jan 2008
During the "Death of Environmentalism" book selling campaign (that's all it was, really), I was struck by how easily people who should know better were willing to buy into a paradigm where the environmental movement consisted entirely of large "inside-the-beltway" mega-organizations. Instead of discussing how funding could be better distributed, or how the large orgs could actually work in concert with the local groups, the discussions focused mostly on how the large orgs could be more effective at what they were already doing, ignoring structural changes in the environmental movement that could make the movement itself more effective.
This article points out some of the basics: remove the subsidies for sprawl. Many of the most apparently intractable environmental problems stem from these subsidies. I include development subsidization by the tax codes here, also.
NIMBY
NOPE
NOT IN MY BACKYARD & NOT ON PLANET EARTH
Steve E.
Whidbey Environmental Action Network
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Sam Wells Posted 7:48 am
15 Jan 2008
But those are not campaigns against sprawl, a critical distinction. Nope, those are campaigns against uber-rich living quarters, or middle-income developments so large as to baffle the imagination. Key tools are requirements that mini-environmental impacts for clean air, water, and soil.
We lose a bunch of the battle but the recent downturn in the economy has really given us some breathing room - nice! /sammie
Onward through the fog
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wiscidea Posted 7:50 am
15 Jan 2008
Do you really want it to be possible for single political party -- such as the current incarnation of the Republican Party -- to acquire control of all three branches of our Federal government and elminate restrictions on use of land in one single sweeping piece of legislation... or by not funding enforcement of Federal laws?
I think it is much better to leave local government in control of such matters. It permits a diverse array of policies to be tested and adopted by different communities, based on local concerns and environmental issues. Others can observe the economic benefits -- or not -- of such policies and create their own plans. Perhaps most important, it permits some communities to adopt strict measures that would never see the light of day if the Federal government was left to handle it.
Please focus on repairing you OWN communities, persuading YOUR neighbors to rein in sprawl, or develop strategies for minimizing sprawl's harm to the environment and share them with the rest of us.
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bookerly Posted 10:10 am
15 Jan 2008
Jon,
Most new housing developments here consist of a group of ten or so high rises clustered in a circle around an open area (mixture of park and playground) often with some street parking, and more underground. The spaces between the buildings (in a compound) are usually grass and bushes. Between the compound and the street there is usually a fairly large setback area which stays open (some of it may contain cars parking from time to time, but a lot of it is open with trees, lawn, benches, bushes, walks, kind of a mini-park).
The ground one to two levels of the outside building is usually retail (though frankly, it seems that some of the recent ones are having trouble attracting retail tenants, rents may be too high). There will be restaurants, supermarkets, all sorts of stores and services. So, even for people who drive, there are usually many services within walking distance.
The style is very different from both Hong Kong and New York City. The streets are generally wider with lots of open space around tall buildings. It is dense, but not thick (smile).
Are there issues and problems?? Affordability is certainly one.
Beijing will probably double in size in the next 20 years. The planning is for a lot of that doubling to take place along mass transit corridors. Also, for institutions like universities (a big chunk of Beijing), housing is provided for students, faculty and workers mostly within the campus or right next to it. This works because the university offers subsidized housing at certain locations, which encourages people to live close to their co-workers (and usually the job). So, even when they need to travel to classes, there are school buses which move people (some of my co-teachers own cars but would never think of driving to work when there is a free convenient bus).
Which helps. Again, the model is very different form other cities I have seen.
Dear Wiscidea,
There is one problem with what you are saying. Which is that sprawl is usually a regional issue, and needs regional planning and solutions. Local governments mainly push it out past their own small city limits and claim to have done something. Unfortunately what they have done is satisfied their own within the limits populace, while making the regional problem worse.
patrick in Beijing
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wiscidea Posted 11:26 pm
15 Jan 2008
You wrote..
"There is one problem with what you are saying. Which is that sprawl is usually a regional issue, and needs regional planning and solutions. Local governments mainly push it out past their own small city limits and claim to have done something. Unfortunately what they have done is satisfied their own within the limits populace, while making the regional problem worse."
There is one problem with what you are saying.
There are local governments that are not only trying to satisfy their own populace. They are trying to preserve a history of environmentally friendly land use policies, trying to preserve farms that have been in the same family for over a century, trying to preserve natural areas they find valuable, trying to preserve local traditions. Their own populace might have invested financial resources and volunteer labor in preserving and restoring natural areas. It does not seem reasonable that a regional planning organization, perhaps not even familiar with the local culture, can step in an erase that overnight just because the town happens to be close to an expanding area and the regional planners decide to sacrifice it to save another area.
There is not even any certainty that the regional organization will base their decision on sound reasons. Perhaps powerful and influencial business interests decide where they would like to see development and "greenwash" it by saying it is best for the environment.
I reget that other areas might feel pressure because developers are forced to go around islands of resistance, but I really believe it is up to local commmunities to decide what they want to see happen around land and homes they might have invested their lives in.
It would be very depressing to see a regional organization approve development of areas my neighbors have worked so hard to manage or restore -- by liberating oak savannas, planting native grassland, or cleaning up streams -- to protect endangered ecosystems.
It would be far better for communities to unite and form regional compacts to resist pressure from developers and investigate ways to minimize harm to the environment that occurs when people do construct homes and businesses beyond urban areas.
I'm confident that our town board has done something to minimize sprawl. They are setting an example for others to follow, not pushing the problem onto someone elses shoulders.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:33 am
16 Jan 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 2:01 am
16 Jan 2008
1/2 hp of human power, plus 1/2 hp of electric power, all wrapped up in a plastic bubble cocoon. Recumbant design with three wheels for the really safety conscious. Two wheel recumbant or regular bike design for the young and/or adventurous.
It's one possible wave of the future. A very green wave of healthy exersize and renewable kwh powered transport. The three wheeled bikes have plenty of carrying capacity for extra cargo too.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Nucbuddy Posted 2:11 am
16 Jan 2008
How could a landlord, without committing the crime of conspiracy, charge more than the going rate and expect to retain any customers?
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caniscandida Posted 2:11 am
16 Jan 2008
my understanding is that in the new high-scale residential buildings just built by Donald Trump on the West Side of Manhattan south of 72nd Street between Lincoln Center and the West Side Highway, a certain number of units were required to be put up for sale for a much lower price, in order to attract residents of different income levels. I wonder if that is the established arrangement now for new buildings of a certain size.
I do not know how exactly Patrick distinguishes between "dense" and "thick." Here in Morningside Heights, where Broadway is like the Nile, I usually avoid walking with Little Dog on Broadway because there are so many pedestrians, and we too easily get in one another's way; so we usually walk on Riverside Drive. I would consider the number of pedestrians on Broadway to be definitely dense during the day, but not thick.
On New Mexico: I lived in Santa Fe in 1993, and revisited Santa Fe and Taos a couple of times recently, the last time this past summer. Santa Fe has been growing, but I do not recall noticing any kind of new light rail service in operation, or even just being built. Possibly it is there, but I missed it -- but in that case, could it be all that big a thing?
Possibly there is something new down around Albuquerque, a city which is also growing, but which I do not know so well.
So if that is true, is it fair to criticize Bill Richardson, for talking the talk but not walking the walk? Generally I like him, and hope he will serve in the next Democratic administration, so I am loath to criticize him. Nevertheless we should ask him what he has done to promote rail service in his sprawling state.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Colin Wright Posted 5:42 am
16 Jan 2008
A second effective form of green stimulus would be to subsidise mass transit ridership. There are approximately 10 billion trips a year on buses, light rail or commuter rail trains. If the federal government gave transit agencies $10bn to reduce the average fare on these trips by $1, this would be a very quick way to get an additional $10bn into the hands of mass transit users. This would be a very progressive tax cut, which would also have the lasting benefit of promoting public transportation.
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bookerly Posted 1:09 pm
16 Jan 2008
Dear Jon and CanisCandida,
I should explain a bit better. Sorry for not being clear (at some point, I hope to get my far behind web site up, then I will publish pictures, alas I can't do so here).
Most housing developments are fairly large (by American standards). They consist of a number of tall buildings of various thickness (not huge blocks, usually a little larger than the skinny scrapers of Vancouver). The buildings sit back from the street forty or fifty yards (varies) thus giving some open space along the street corridor and preventing the solid wall effect we see in cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York. Each building has open space around it (say 20 yards or so at the closest, and more otherwise) so that while they are tall, they don't feel quite so dense (again, no solid wall effect). Ground and maybe second floor retail and amenities.
There is also (so far as I know), no zoning that prohibits business and residential from sharing the same space. I worked for a television production company that was on the same floor as several apartments (and recently did some recording in a small studio that was basically an apartment converted to office space.) This helps reduce commuting.
Many of the buildings contain underground housing which is cheaper and available for workers in the complex. Fancy, no? (But remember that this is a developing country, and it is often better than workers get in other developing countries, most of them don't complain, the price is right!) But not terrible, either (and often free with the job, or very very cheap).
There are already too many cars (IMHO), but bikes still outnumber them (smile). Many of the cars are quite small, and there are also lots of little motorized three wheelers which people take for short distances (which is more efficient than taking a taxi a short distance). Plus, there are lots of bicycle delivery and manual carts (three wheel carts without engines), plus carts with engines, electric bikes, motorcycles, and mule drawn wagons are all in use. The wider range of available services encourages efficiency.
The government is also investing heavily in new subway lines. Which are quite lovely, and cheap (they also reduced the price of bus tickets and subway tickets to encourage ridership, as near as I can tell, it mainly means my students set out more often!).
Things are not always so close (though I can bike most places I need to go in less than 1 1/2 hours), but there are services very close by mostly (within walking distance). And people do walk a lot.
Interestingly, in the time I have been here, the government has changed its ideas about how to develop as it saw how things were working out. I like cities, and feel that it is quite livable (except on bad air days), but some people don't like cities.
And there are still many small open air markets where you can get goods and services cheaply (I got the $2 bicycle chain instead of the $1.6 the other day, I suspect my old one will be repaired and sold for 50 cents or so).
The two cities I have seen with the most refreshing approaches to density are Vancouver and Beijing (IMHO).
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 1:16 pm
16 Jan 2008
Dear Wiscidea,
Basically, I disagree with you. My experience in working on land use and planning issues is that local governments always adopt a NIMBY approach. And that by doing so, the practical effect of their decisions is to push the problem out beyond their city (or town) limits. Many of the small towns in America are quite small, and use zoning to protect their class interests (the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Boston area are two examples with which I am intimately familiar).
I am all in favor of preserving open space and farmland, but the way to do so is through regional planning. Otherwise, you end up preserving the open space and farm land in the wealthier areas, and not in the poorer areas (good regional planning should preserve more overall).
The wealthier areas protect their own interests, but show no concern for what happens beyond their town borders. This means the poorer areas (that have less power) are more easily ravaged by developers.
If sustainability is to have any meaning, it must be regional. And must include both wealthy and poor communities.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 1:21 pm
16 Jan 2008
Where there are housing shortages, there is no such thing as "the going rate", rather there is only what the market will bear. If we give poor renters subsidies for living in small units, then the most likely reaction of landlords is to raise the rents by almost the same amount, thus transferring the money to their pockets.
It doesn't require a formal conspiracy to do this. But most landlords do belong to landlord associations, which provide them the venue for conspiring if they need to do so.
The "market" does not work for rental housing for a number of reasons. It needs to be controlled to protect poorer families. Otherwise, they will be forced out of denser urban areas, and will have to commute longer and longer distances (which is not environmentally friendly at all).
patrick in Beijing
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