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.

Obesity and Urbanism

Richard Florida recently published an entry on his Creative Class blog entitled The Geography of Obesity. It further underscores the real health crisis that we are facing as a nation. Climate change continues to get all the attention but its effects are negligible compared to deaths caused by obesity and automobile accidents in the United States. Both of these are impacted in large part by the design of our communities. It's interesting that the south and west, with their 20th century sprawling patterns of development are also home to the highest rates of obesity. Even if diets changed, people would still face a largely hostile environment when they left their homes to exercise. Walkable urbanism...it's what you do after (a healthy) dinner.

"Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in America. More than 72 million American adults are obese, according to estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics. But obesity varies greatly by state. The map below, from the Centers from Disease Control (CDC), shows the obesity rate for the 50 states, measured as the share of people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) over 30 which the CDC classifies as “obese.”

It should come as little surprise that states with higher levels of obesity have significantly higher rates of death from cancer, heart disease, and cerebrovascular diseases like hypertension. There is a significant correlation between obesity and death rates from cancer (.7), heart disease (.7), and cerebrovascular disease (.7)."

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.

Sprawl is Still Bad, Regardless of the Measure

The National Academy of Sciences released a report this month entitled Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions -- Special Report 298. A summary of the report can be downloaded from the Transportation Research Board.

Interestingly, this article was reported by Technology Review, under the title Forget Curbing Suburban Sprawl.

They report that "urban planners hoping to help mitigate CO2 emissions by increasing housing density would do better to focus on fuel-efficiency improvements to vehicles, investments in renewable energy, and cap and trade legislation now being voted on in Congress, according to the study, released Tuesday. It concludes that increasing population density in metropolitan areas would yield insignificant CO2 reductions."

They go on to further report that "even if 75 percent of all new and replacement housing in America were built at twice the density of current new developments, and those living in the newly constructed housing drove 25 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions from personal travel would decline nationwide by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050, according to the study. If just 25 percent of housing units were developed at such densities and residents drove only 12 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent by 2050."

So should we go ahead and throw in the towel? Has all this advocacy for improving our built environment been for naught? Absolutely not. In fact, the evidence to change our built environment and offer more urban solutions has never been more necessary.

The two principal recommendations of the report were that:

1. Policies that support more compact, mixed-use development and reinforce its ability to reduce VMT, energy use, and CO2 emissions should be encouraged.
2. More carefully designed studies of the effects of land use patterns and the form and location of more compact, mixed-use development on VMT, energy use, and CO2 emissions are needed to implement compact development more effectively.

As if reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the only reason to encourage more compact, mixed-use development. And, in fact, the report notes that there are plenty of other excellent reasons to change our development patterns.

Changes in development patterns entail other benefits and costs that have not been quantified in this study.
On the benefit side, more compact, mixed-use development should reduce some infrastructure costs, increase the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of public transit, and expand housing choices where compact developments are undersupplied. Other benefits include less conversion of agricultural and other environmentally fragile areas and greater opportunities for physical activity by facilitating the use of non-motorized modes of travel, such as walking and bicycling.

And never mind the fact that the changing demographics over the past 40 years are radically changing the face of housing. Lot sizes have been in decline for decades based largely on market preferences. But if compact communities won't yield the biggest gain in GHG reductions should we just allow sprawl to perpetuate? No.

If we have learned anything from this recession it's that suburban development and its necessary dependence on leveraged debt is economically volatile at best. Suburban development patterns have also been shown to increase environmental degradation of our water supplies and our forests. The promise of the big house in the suburbs increases energy needs because of excessively high heated (and cooled) floor are per person and reduces family time due to commuting. Surburbia has shown to underperform in many ways over the last couple of decades and GHGs are only but one indicator of many.

The reason for urbanism is more than just reducing GHGs. It is because good urbanism is more resilient to changes in our future. Good urbanism provides choices in housing, in transportation, and in shopping. Sprawl limits choices. And the proposed solutions highlighted by Technology Review are expensive and untested. Urbanism, on the other hand, has a substantial track record for being adaptable. Choice is good.