Tag Archives: sprawl

Too much open space?

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by Michael Lewyn

Prof. Robert Ellickson of Yale Law School has an interesting paper up on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) website. He critciizes widespread popular support for open space, pointing out that too much open space reduces population density and thus accelerates sprawl and reduces housing supply.

Although Ellickson’s paper is not primarily focused on remedies, he does have a couple of interesting ideas. First, he suggests that a reform-minded state legislature could pass a law “that limited to 1/4 acre the maximum lot size that a locality could impose without incurring presumptive liability for both a regulatory taking and the complainant’s attorney fees.” I suspect that smart growth supporters would generally like this idea but might prefer slightly different numbers: for example, prohibiting local governments from mandating any densities too low to support public transit (thus, 1/8 or 1/10 of an acre rather than 1/4). In addition, smart growth supporters might favor limiting this rule to more urbanized areas, rather than allowing medium-density development to sprawl throughout the region.

Ellickson also addresses the overuse of conservation easements, pointing out that cities indirectly coerce such easements by downzoning property, which in turn reduces the property’s value, which in turn makes the conservation easement option more tempting than development.  Ellickson proposes that denying tax benefits for gifts of open space where “the area of undeveloped land exceeds a certain percentage of the total land area” — that is, where a region is already drowning in undeveloped land.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org, with modifications.)

Learning From London’s Comeback

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A recent post on Citymetric.com suggests that after losing population for decades, London will soon reach its pre-World War II peak of 8.6 million people. London last achieved this population level in 1939, and lost nearly two million people after World War II, bottoming out at 6.7 million in 1988. Can we learn anything from this? Why, yes we can. To name a few things:

1.  One common pro-sprawl argument has always been that sprawl exists in Europe and is thus inevitable. But the recent growth of London reminds us that in Europe as well as the U.S., cities can rebuild and become more desirable again.

2.  But this growth comes with a cost. London’s rebirth has been accompanied by exploding housing costs, perhaps because more people creates more demand for housing. (Or to put the matter another way: it does not seem to be the case that foreign rich people buying condos are the primary cause of high housing costs).

3.  The common anti-market solution to high housing costs is to limit construction, on the theory that new construction creates more demand. But London seems to have more or less tried this solution; according to the Citymetric article, “Since 1992, when London started to grow again, housebuilding has been barely a quarter of the 1930s rate.”

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

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 →

Learning from Kansas City

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Kansas City, Missouri (where I am a visiting professor for the current academic year) is a medium-demand city: a city with more successful neighborhoods than Cleveland or Detroit, but one still dominated by its suburbs to a greater extent than more successful cities. One reason the city keeps losing people to its suburbs is the low reputation of the city’s school district. In the city’s affluent southwest side, only 27 percent of K-12 children attend public schools. Moreover, many people who would otherwise live in those neighborhoods have moved to Kansas so they can send their children to the overwhelmingly white public schools of Overland Park, Leawood, and other suburbs. Why are Kansas City’s schools so unpopular?

I recently read Complex Justice, a book by political scientist Joshua Dunn about Kansas City’s schools. While much of Dunn’s work focuses on litigation strategy and judicial decision making, he also makes a few points relevant to the problems of urban school districts.

In particular, Dunn shows that some of the city’s public schools became all-black almost as soon as desegregation took place. For example,Kansas City’s Central High School was almost 90 percent white in 1955, and by 1965 had only 16 white students (out of over 2000). Similarly, Paseo High School was 6 percent African-American in 1959 and 97 percent African-American in 1969. So it appears that Kansas City’s whites were ready to move out as soon as blacks moved in—a fact that suggests that whites decided that a school was “bad” as soon as a critical mass of African-Americans moved in. Continue reading →

Best Practices in Sprawl: Apartments

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westgate

When I visted Fargo, North Dakota, I saw a few things I liked, such as a nicely fixed-up downtown and a beautiful historic district just south of downtown.

But I also saw something I liked in the suburb-like west side of town. An apartment complex was right in front of a far-too-wide suburban commercial street, rather than being set back behind a giant driveway as is often the case in suburbia.*  Why is this a good thing?  Because when an apartment building is right next to the sidewalk, its occupants can easily walk to nearby bus stops and stores (even in a suburb where crossing the street is a problem).

*For excellent examples of what NOT to do, go to Google Street View and look at Big Tree Lane in Jacksonville, Fla.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Highway to Serfdom

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(cross-posted from planetizen.com, with minor modifications)

In “The Road to Serfdom,” F.A. Hayek wrote, “Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated.” Hayek was of course thinking about economic planning designed to govern society as a whole. However, his thoughts could just as easily be applied to transportation and land use policy; at all levels of government, 20th-century American land use and transportation planners sought to support “one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated”—making cars go as fast as possible. For example, American planners bulldozed city neighborhoods to build highways so that cars could go from downtown to suburbs as rapidly as possible, widened existing roads so that cars could move as rapidly as possible, and limited density everywhere because of concerns about traffic congestion.

Much has been written about whether these policies have achieved their goals; however, it seems to me that even if car-oriented policies have reduced congestion, they may have also led to restrictions on the freedom of nondrivers.

Here’s why: after a few decades of car-oriented policies, driving inevitably became the norm in most of the United States. This alone need not, in theory, restrict the freedom of nondrivers.* However, once driving became the norm, politicians, police officers and prosecutors inevitably began to see walking as abnormal or even dangerous, and as a result have begun to limit pedestrians’ liberty in the name of security.

A very early manifestation of this mentality was anti-jaywalking statutes; in the 1920s, the automobile lobby and its allies persuaded state and local politicians to enact statutes outlawing something called “jaywalking”—that is, walking anywhere except at certain portions of the street (that is, intersections). Even at intersections, pedestrians can only cross streets for a few seconds at a time. Americans supported these statutes because they thought without these limits, pedestrians would not be safe from speeding cars.**

By contrast, drivers have the entire street at their disposal. In the most car-dominated places, police have gone beyond fining pedestrians for this offense; in some places, pedestrians have been arrested for jaywalking, and in others, they have been treated even more harshly. For example, if you are walking with a child at the wrong place or time and the child is hit by a car, you may be prosecuted for manslaughter, on the theory that your jaywalking caused the crash. If your jury is comprised of people who drive everywhere and view walking as abnormal and dangerous, your chances of acquittal are probably not very good.

On the other hand, police (many of whom spend lots of time in cars) and prosecutors tend to treat errant drivers leniently; as long as the state cannot prove a driver did not kill a pedestrian intentionally or after drinking copious amounts of alcohol, a driver who kills a pedestrian is unlikely to receive significant punishment in some jurisdictions. Less serious violations of traffic law are treated even less seriously by government and by the public; for example, I suspect that nearly every American who drives a car violates speed limits on a fairly regular basis.

Jaywalking statutes do at least allow walkers to cross some streets at some points. However, some government officials have gone even further in keeping minor pedestrians off the streets. If government officials view walking as dangerous, a logical step is to limit minors’ access to this activity. And most states have created perfect tools for such limitations, by enacting vague laws prohibiting “neglect” or “endangerment” or children. In some places, if you let your child walk (or even play) outside and anyone sees the child present without you, you can be arrested (and possibly even lose your child) for this offense, if the nearest police officer believes that a child alone is in more danger than a child in her parents’ vehicle. Continue reading →