Harvard Business Review Eschews Sprawl

"To put it simply, the suburbs have lost their sheen," writes Ania Wieckowski in the May edition of Harvard Business Review." Her article, Back to the City, suggests that "(some) companies are getting a jump on a major cultural and demographic shift away from suburban sprawl. The change is imminent, and businesses that don’t understand and plan for it may suffer in the long run."

"The change is about more than evolving tastes; it’s at least partly a reaction to real problems created by suburbs. Their damage to quality of life is well chronicled. For instance, studies in 2003 by the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion linked sprawl to rising obesity rates. (By contrast, new research in Preventive Medicine demonstrates, people living in more urban communities reap health benefits because they tend to walk more.) Car culture hurts mental health as well. Research by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and his team shows that out of a number of daily activities, commuting has the most negative effect on people’s moods. And economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer have found that commuters who live an hour away from work would need to earn 40% more money than they currently do to be as satisfied with their lives as noncommuters.

A recent report sponsored by Bank of America, the Greenbelt Alliance, and the Low Income Housing Fund examines the inefficiencies of the current “geographical mismatch between workers and jobs.” Focusing on California, it says that sprawl “reduc[es] the quality of life,” “increase[s] the attractiveness of neighboring states,” and yields “higher direct business costs and taxes to offset the side-effects of sprawl”—which include transportation, health care, and environmental costs."

The article also quotes Carol Colleta, the Executive Director with CEOs for Cities that “increasingly CEOs understand that without a vibrant central city, their region becomes less competitive. Good CEOs care about the fate of their cities, because they have to question whether that is the place where they can attract the talent they need.”

Slowly but surely the pieces are all being tied together by many formerly disparate interests that suburbia isn't as healthy or sustainable as it was once promoted. Suburbs have their place, for sure, but not to the exclusion of the rest of our developed and undeveloped areas. Natures dislikes a monoculture and the single-minded focus on suburbia as the exclusive panacea to our society's ills is thankfully being unraveled.

Why Climate Change Won't Matter

It seems that we can't turn a corner without climate change being attributed to some problem or something that we are doing having an impact on climate change. Wait, wait. Before you click away and think that this is some skeptic panning the latest report, fear not. If anything this report is one of climate agnosticism. In some regards, I don't know if I care or not about climate change. The reason is because climate change has usurped nearly every other issue.

While scientists and environmentalists fight over how soon the sea level will rise 4 inches, millions of children and adults will face increasing obesity-related illnesses; our seniors will become more isolated and institutionalized; thousands more will die in auto-related accidents, and our cost of living will spiral because of our insatiable demand for cheap oil will be surpassed by the growing third world.

These are the really pressing issues of the next decade. Saving energy with compact florescent lightbulbs and driving a Prius (of which I do both) will have little effect on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon-based energy usage if we continue to build our communities in ways that only further necessitate travel by automobile. As so many others are starting to loudly point out, we can't greenwash our way out of our excess using more consumable gizmos.

“…if sprawling development continues … the projected 48% increase in (VMT) between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and low-carbon fuels.

Even if the most stringent fuel-efficiency proposals under consideration are enacted, vehicle emissions still would be 34% above 1990 levels in 2030 – entirely off-track from reductions of 60-80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 required for climate protection.”
Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change" by Reid Ewing, Arthur C. Nelson, and Keith Bartholomew

The truth is that none of the popular solutions being discussed have anything to do with the actual urban form of our communities. Perhaps that is the inconvenient truth. Perhaps the truth is that the anthropogenic impact on our climate is in fact irreversible and changes are inevitable. Which areas are better suited to manage change - the cities or the suburbs? I will continue to argue that the cities must be nurtured and supported because they will not only be havens for resilience in the new economy but they are uniquely positioned to accommodate the human condition regardless of the climatic condition. Lest we not forget that cities have long been the centers of civilization in varying geographies and climates, and during a wide range of economic times. Suburbs, conversely, are generally a monoculture (which as my friend Tony Sease recently pointed was in itself an oxymoron). As such they are predicated on highly leveraged, isolated developments tied together by predominately auto-oriented transportation networks. And like monocultures in nature, they are less resilient to change. One small jump in the price of gas in the summer of 2008 began to unravel the sweater.

Until we start to really address the fundamental issues of community growth and development, our gizmos will remain on the fringe of making any difference. This means that we must begin to radically rethink how we do business. Far too often, we have been forced into a one-sided solution created by a specialist with little regard to the larger picture. Sure, greenways are great, but are they built at the expense of a basic sidewalk network that can be used to walk to a store? Do our stormwater management practices actually encourage more sprawling development patterns at the behest of water quality. Do we build large schools in far flung locations because of land cost and generalized standards? Are we funding road widening and highway expansion because they are shovel-ready? And do we fund transportation improvements along a single corridor rather than seeking out more comprehensive solutions across the network because of short-sighted funding and policy directives.

I firmly believe that sea level rise, variable rainfall, and variable extreme temperatures can all be adapted to by our cities. Cap and trade will not ensure a walkable neighborhood in which our graying population can remain active in through their retirement years. Nor will it prevent obesity and its various illnesses including heart disease and diabetes. According to the March 10, 2004 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol 291, No. 10), the number two cause of death in the United States was poor diet and physical inactivity (just slightly behind tobacco) but it represented a larger percentage change from the previous decade - a nearly 33% increase. Interestingly, the second most rapidly growing cause of death is death by automobile which has recorded a nearly 72% increase from 1990 to 2000 growing from 25,000 to 43,000 deaths each year.

We are on track to kill more people with our poorly built communities than with sea level rise and I suspect that driving hybrid cars will have little impact on either of these trends in the next two decades. It's time that we start to have a frank discussion about the realities of today rather than the scientific speculation of tomorrow and let our policies flow from more mutually beneficial solutions. Walkable urbanism is capable of resilience in any climate. And it is better suited to improving the human habitat as well. But, if climate change is due to truly impact us, I firmly believe a city will be the preferred development pattern.

Shrinking Cities: What can we learn from Detroit?

The post below is written by Peter Zeiler who serves as the Transit Station Area Development Coordinator in the Neighborhood & Business Services for the City of Charlotte. He can be reached at pzeiler@CharlotteNC.gov.

Back up in Detroit I spent a lot of time and energy focused around the Shrinking Cities project and discussing the issue with local and global policy makers.

One of the key points missed in planning for a shrinking city is property ownership & control and the costs to actually a policy of shrinking. Disinvestment is not linear or block by block. A city managing decline must rationalize the chaotic decay in order to effect any meaningful change other than the natural entropy – which as we have seen is not a viable model.

The costs to return large tracts of patchwork land in neighborhoods back to natural or agricultural (or even industrial) uses is staggering.

As an example, a project I worked on in Detroit over a seven year period was to basically apply the coup de grace to a dead neighborhood. Out of 1,600 homes in 1940 in the target neighborhood, only about 400 were still standing. 100 of those were vacant, the other 300 were about half owner occupied, 85% were sub-code and the households were largely impoverished. Nearly 700 of the vacant parcels were already owned by the City through tax foreclosure.

The neighborhood was surrounded by industrial uses in a classic pre-zoning land use pattern. The goal was to remove the vestiges of the trapped neighborhood, move the residents to other neighborhoods that had a chance to survive to help stabilize them and then backfill the site. The site would become an industrial / office park with excellent freeway access and tax free status for 15 years through a program known as Renaissance Zones (businesses would be exempt from all non-bonded property tax, utility taxes and all local and state business taxes- and we would sell them the newly cleared land with significant writedowns).

Shorty story – it failed. Miserably.

The cost to relocate households averaged about $150,000 - $200,000 per household despite the fact that their homes were valued generally at less than $30,000. Following state and federal guidelines for eminent domain added significant (and wholly justifiable and ethically correct) expenditures. Then came the task of tracking down and condemning vacant 40’ x 90’ residential lots – at an average expense of $35,000 per parcel.

Once the majority of the site was acquired the physical work needed to be engaged. Because we were demolishing a significant number of structures, the entire site needed to undergo a full EPA analysis – meaning house by house investigation for contaminants which would be part of an overall environmental program. No just bulldozing the home, you had to check each and every one and – for example - mitigate ACMs like linoleum mastics by hand. $3,000 per unit demos skyrocketed to upwards of $60,000 per in some cases. There were significant costs to relocate water, sewer, gas and electrical infrastructure that ran through the site and connected to other neighborhoods. Infrastructure is a network, not a system of nodes that can be switched off arbitrarily and thus creates reengineering and rerouting challenges. Then the vacant land and abandoned streets had to be remediated (lead, arsenic etc in soils, PCB plumes from neighboring uses) and grubbed.

In short nearly $120 million was used to create a 50 acre industrial park - without roads. Recall the Empowerment Zone program of the Clinton era that was to spark urban redevelopment was criticized as squandering tax payer dollars by granting $100 million to each of six cities. The entirety of the Detroit Title IX money could have been consumed and still not been enough for the 50 acres of the site.

The result of all this is a 200,000 square foot JIT (just in time) warehouse facility that employs 60. Even with generous land write-downs and nearly full tax exemption for 15 years, the site did not attract users. There are simply no jobs left in southeast Detroit and no reason to move jobs there. Now if that is the cost for 50 acres, the math for even 10% of the 138 square miles of Detroit would be staggering.

This isn’t to say that the goal is not worthy or that it can’t be done. Flint, MI and Youngstown, OH have moved towards managing decay but they are timid steps still. The concept is viable and no longer groundbreaking in a policy context. The next step that needs to be taken to advance the policy of managed decline is a true accounting of its costs and a national program to address it.

I have a hunch that when people see the cost of managed decline and its non-existent ROI, the costs of regeneration will seem like chicken feed in comparison. If we are gun-shy to spend $100 million in ten years in Detroit for regeneration, how gun-shy will we be for the billions to create forests?

The time has come to move beyond the idea. If urbanists and environmentalists want to move the managed decline argument forward, it’s time to start hanging a price tag on it. It may be that the most compelling argument for sprawl containment and smart growth is the exponentially higher cost of returning developed land back to nature for which we are now beginning to have an understanding of the full and quantifiable costs.

Food for thought.

How will the next 50 years be different?

Interesting question. Perhaps the bigger question is why the next 50 years must be different. To do so we must have an understanding of the failure of our built (and natural) environment since the end of World War II. I don't need to rehash the well documented impacts that the explosion of suburbia has had on the global economy. To find the best resource on that, check out Suburban Nation, by Andres Duany, Lizz Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. More importantly, just open the paper.

The most tenuous parts of our economy were based on the suburbs. The auto-industry failed because it over-leveraged itself into gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles sold to people with average commuted in excess of 20 miles each way. Foreclosures are highest in the suburbs because families "drove until they qualified" for a large house or builders/developers constructed subdivisions for whole populations that never arrived (I'll need to cover that more in the myth of popular demographics). Banks and large financial institutions failed because they either bundled highly leveraged mortgages for those people who couldn't afford the home in the first place (mortgage backed securities) and then insured their profitability as credit default swaps. And then someone tugged at the loose string of our economic sweater and it all unraveled.

Perhaps if there is one lesson that we have learned it's that the suburbs are predicated upon an often untenable dream - one that is mired in debt, future costs, monthly payments and IOUs. And I'm not just referring to the average household. And this debt is not always in the form or a financial instrument. Often times our built environment is built on premise that a future generation will pay for what we purchased. Drained wetlands, drought-starved rivers, lost farmlands, dependence on foreign oil (if we still use oil in 50 years) - these are the costs that future generations will be saddled with if we don't continue to change our fundamental approach to growth.

Smart growth, new urbanism, compact communities, sustainable cities - these are all buzzwords that boil down to the need to think strategically and systemically. Yes, growth is indeed good. And to borrow as phrase from Charlotte, NC Mayor Pat McCrory - "if you are not growing (as a city), you are dying." This site is therefore intended to explore the ways in which our communities can grow more sustainably - economically, environmentally, and socially - into the next 50 years. We'll find some lessons and best practices in the past and the present but mostly we'll be inventing a new wheel, a new way of growing our cities and towns. As a city planning practitioner, I'm excited about the possibilities. The moonshot of our generation will not be the compact, florescent light bulb. I believe it will be the compact, efficient community that's paid for by this generation and left to the next as a debt-free inheritance.