Monthly Archives: December 2014

Is Mismanagement the Cause of Legacy Cities’ Decline?

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When I was arguing with someone about sprawl in declining “legacy cities,” I ran into the following argument (loosely paraphrased): “The reason places like Detroit are declining isn’t because of sprawl but because of municipal corruption and mismanagement. Fix that instead of worrying about suburbia.”

At first glance, this argument seems appealing: after all, one former mayor of Detroit is in prison, and Detroit’s low level of public services is certainly highly suspicious.

Nevertheless, I am not sure the argument is provable, because there is no easy way to quantify mismanagement; thus, there is no objective way to verify that Detroit is any more mismanaged than more prosperous cities.

There appears to be little evidence that Detroit is unusually corrupt: more affluent cities and suburbs have had equally scandalous governments. For example, Atlanta has gained population for two decades in a row, despite having a mayor who served prison time for tax evasion and a major scandal in its public schools (involving over 100 teachers and principals who rewrote students’ incorrect answers on standardized tests).

Fast-growing suburbs have also had questionable leadership: Orange County, California declared bankruptcy in 1994 because of some foolish investment decisions and has a former sheriff who in 2009 collected over $200,000 in pension payments despite a felony conviction.

Detroit’s decline also should not be blamed on fiscal liberalism: although Detroit’s spending level in 2011 ($5,437 per capita in direct expenditures) exceeded the national urban average, it spent about the same amount as Atlanta ($5,408) and less than Nashville (just over $6,200) or San Francisco (which spent over $11,000 per resident) (NOTE: more details are available in this database). Continue reading →

The Economist and Suburbia: A Fistful of Myths

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The Economist magazine recently ran a series of articles trying to defend suburbia, along the same lines that were common in the 1990s; rather than trying to deny the harmful social and environmental impacts of suburban sprawl, the articles argued that sprawl is popular and inevitable. Much of the article is about developing nations such as China and India; I lack the expertise to discuss suburbanization in these places. However, it seems to me that many of the articles’ statements are irrelevant to the United States and Canada. To name a few:

1. “[A]lmost every city is becoming less dense.” This is the old “everyone does it” theory of suburban sprawl: its just a worldwide trend, nothing we can do about it. Of course, this sort of argument completely overlooks distinctions of degree. Does anyone really think there’s no difference between Vancouver and Phoenix, or between Amsterdam and Detroit?

2. “The simple truth is that people become richer they consume more space.” So, logically, as American wages have stagnated over the past several decades, suburbia should have stopped in its tracks long ago. (Somehow this failed to occur, at least until the last decade or so). Moreover, if this were true, our nation’s declining industrial regions, like Buffalo and Detroit, would have become hubs of urbanization, while rich regions, like San Francisco and New York, would have turned into huge versions of Phoenix. In fact, the richest regions have growing central cities—and were it not for restrictive zoning, these central cities would probably be growing more far more rapidly. By contrast, central cities in stagnant regions, such as Detroit and Buffalo, generally continue to lose population decade after decade (though even these regions are starting to experience downtown growth).

To be fair, there may be some truth in this argument in the developing-world context: perhaps people use more wealth to buy more space up to some minimal level of affluence. But the sprawl/wealth correlation does not seem so strong in the United States. Continue reading →

Secrets of Congestion-Busting Cities

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Recently, I read an email newsletter arguing that cities really can build their way out of congestion, because the regions that have actually reduced congestion have built so many roads that the increased road mileage actually exceeded the increase in vehicle miles traveled.

I have no doubt that this proposition is true for the past few years, but only because over the past decade or so, congestion decreased in most cities, regardless of their policies. According to the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), the number of hours per driver lost per congestion in the 101 largest urbanized areas decreased from 52 in 2005 (its all-time high) to 43 in 2011—the same level as in 1996. (All TTI data discussed here are available at an Excel spreadsheet available at this link.)

But to me, the more interesting question is the long-term trend, starting from 1982 (the first year of TTI’s statistical database). Because congestion increased almost everywhere during the 1980s and 1990s, only three regions are less congested (as measured by hours lost per driver) than 30 years ago: Anchorage, Alaska, Indio-Palm Springs, California, and Lancaster, California.

In Anchorage, the number of freeway lane miles did not keep up with vehicle miles traveled (VMT): VMT increased by just over 70 percent (from 800,000 to 1.38 million) and lane-miles increased by just over 50 percent (from 125 to 190). However, arterial lane-miles did grow more rapidly, increasing by 28 percent (from 300 to 386) while arterial VMT increased by less than 20 percent.

In Indio, freeway miles increased by 144 percent (from 45 miles to 110) while VMT again increased somewhat more rapidly, by 171 percent (from 390,000 to 1.058 million). Arterial streets increased by 136 percent (from 345 miles to 817), while arterial street VMT increased by 179 percent (from 1.6 million to 4.473 million). So even for arterial streets, VMT actually increased more rapidly than road mileage. Continue reading →

Why Do We Overlook a Golden Opportunity?

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130+ acre working farm in Lower Macungie. If the township doesn’t get proactive in preservation this will be 300 units someday.

130+ acre working farm in Lower Macungie. If the township doesn’t get proactive in preservation this will be 300 units someday.

by Ron Beitler According to the One Lehigh Valley Local Food Economy Report – The biggest barrier to fostering a more robust local food economy is continued loss of farmland. 

Important to note since often overlooked: Agriculture IS a form of industrial infrastructure. Yet communities continue to pave over this invaluable asset only to replace it with uses that require additional infrastructure and strain local resources to sustain. Farmland is fiscally one of the highest value land uses in terms of liabilities vs. revenue.

  • Since 1930 the LV has lost 80% of it’s farms. Based on average diets Lehigh Valley farmers can only produce about 20% of the Valley’s food demands. With a market shift towards locally grown foods there is clearly money to be made in both local and regional economies.

All it takes are strategic investments in “food infrastructure” needed to support a local food economy. For ex: Aggregators, distributors, food business incubators, grain mills, and more food hubs. Even underserved and undervalued we already today have a local food economy that contributes $17 million annually to the LV economy. Continue reading →

Freeways, New and Improved!

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Freewaysby Michael Brown

Urban freeways provided unprecedented mobility for decades, and helped the United States sustain a strong economy throughout those decades.  But their success eventually became their demise.  They enabled far-flung lifestyles, which induced demand and congested them faster than we expected.  At first it was cheap and easy to convert medians and shoulders to lanes. Unfortunately that enabled even further driving from the next wave of fringe residents. Now it is getting too expensive to expand, and we know that congestion will return soon anyway.

But hey, we’re Americans! Big things are what we do!  Yes, the spirit is able, but when we think about that federal debt clock getting close to $20-trillion, a small voice inside gnaws at us, “You already spent all the money, and your children’s money too. Fort Knox is full of IOU’s to who-knows-who?  Even if you can get another loan from China – they’re figuring out that you’ll never pay them back – how can you do this in good conscience?”  And we respond, “But how can we not?  Mobility is life!  Mobility is the economy!  We can’t earn the money we need to get out of our debts if we can’t get around!”

There Are Solutions!  Before you get liquored up at the “Build-Your-Way-Out Bar & Grill” once more, READ THIS!!  Earlier articles in this series articulated the benefits of two freeway optimization strategies – congestion pricing and preventive ramp metering (sometimes called “Managed Motorways”).  Either system can optimize traffic flow (i.e., eliminate mainline congestion), but both come with negative side effects and political hurdles.  That’s why there are few examples!  HOT lanes are the baby steps we’ve been able to make because they’re politically acceptable.  But the bang-for-buck of HOT lanes is much less impressive than pricing or preventive metering. Continue reading →

Critiquing the “Twenty Percent” Argument

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(Cross-posted from www.planetizen.com)

I just received a email newsletter raising the decades-old argument that public transit gets too much federal support because transit gets 20 percent of federal funding for surface transportation, but its share of trips and transportation mileage is far lower.

One obvious retort to this argument is environmental: highway spending, by encouraging automobile travel to car-dependent places, increases vehicle miles traveled (VMT), thus increasing pollution—not just greenhouse gas pollution, but also more heavily regulated types of pollution such as carbon monoxide and particulate matter. To the extent that highway spending increases such social harms, one dollar of spending may be one dollar too much, let alone the tens of billions of dollars currently devoted to roads.

In addition, highway spending can create other negative side effects: for example, where jobs track new highways but public transit does not, a “spatial mismatch” exists between the pre-highway population and jobs; population was located in more urban areas, but the highway has shifted jobs into outer suburbs and exurbs. To the extent people react to this spatial mismatch by buying cars and driving more, they have suffered additional costs caused by government action. To the extent people too poor to buy cars cannot reach work, they have suffered an even more severe cost: the loss of job opportunities.

Furthermore, the “20 percent” argument overlooks both the impact of past spending and the existence of current non-transportation policies that effectively subsidize highways and sprawl.

In the first half of the 20th century, government at all levels spent liberally on highway, but streetcars (the leading mode of public transit in most of the United States) were a private industry, which meant that government’s job was to tax and regulate it. So in many places, roads got not only the money devoted to roads, but also the implicit subsidy that government created by taxing and regulating the competition. And over the course of the 20th century, transit received far less than 20 percent of government transportation spending. Continue reading →