Merry Christmas! At last the Suburbs are Shrinking

by Richard Register

Actually, merrier than that, the title of one of the articles I'll comment on here is "The Death of the Fringe Suburb" by Christopher Leinberger, President of a coalition of real estate developers called Locus. He was writing for the New York Times, published November 25, 2011 and represents the activist "Smart Growth" type of developer favoring the transit oriented, higher density centers of vitality and "functional diversity," as we rather dryly call such centers in Ecocity Builders.

Another article I'll look at there was one year earlier and four times as long in the Post Carbon Reader Series called "The Death of Sprawl," by Warren Karlenzig, urban planning consultant and author of "How Green is your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings" (2007). He went into greater detail on the subject.

Sometimes a death is worth celebrating, for example when you eat some good food, either outright killed - carrots, chickens and cattle for example - though sometimes just stolen - eggs, milk and fruit for example. But in this case it's the death of the oh so active and dangerous bad guy, the source of energy squandering, displacement of farm land, death on the transport system in accidents, climate change damage, loss of biodiversity, enormous waste of money and time on freeways and cars, in commuting... But you've heard that all before in this newsletter. Anyway, things are looking up!

Abondoned sprawl, photo by the author

One more article touchstone: National Geographic in its current issue, December 2011, has a special section on cities, celebrating cities. Here too sprawl is becoming the bad guy, but not to get your hopes up too much ("Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated," as Mark Twain once joked). Sprawl is expanding in many places outside the US - but so is our knowledge about it how destructive it is. That article, replete as usual in the magazine with amazing photographs and authoritative graphs, is called "The City Solution," by Robert Kunzig. His general thesis is that the best city is the solution, best being roughly kindred to the ecocity - at least it has or should have a dense infrastructure of great variety of activity close together and a good public transit system. So far so good. But quoted there from Shlomo Angel, a professor at New York University and Princeton, in a study sampling 120 cities all over the world, "cities are spreading out faster than people are pouring into them; on average they are getting 2% less dense every year. By 2030 their built up area could triple. What's driving expansion? Rising income and cheap transportation." Yes the US, which has probably gotten about as sprawled out as possible, may be at last headed in the right direction. That's hopeful but this country only represents about 4.5% of the world's population. So even if you don't prematurely start your sprawl reversal ecocity celebration quite yet, it is generally helpful news from all these sources that we are at least waking up to the positive side of cities as the awareness of the destructiveness of sprawl is getting ever clearer.

Rising Values in and Near Centers Good

Leinberger in his short piece in the New York Times says failure of the fringe can be measured in housing values; whereas ten years ago the highest value homes were largely on the distant fringes of the city, now they are shifting close in to the centers.

He details the American demographics against the burbs: The Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), are beginning to retire in mass about now and don't need all that space, wasted now that the kids are long gone and enthusiasm for pushing the lawnmower under the increasingly hot climate change sun is diminished with age and boredom, in the suburbs. Boomers are showing clear signs of moving in close for the conviviality of easy conversation, cafes, etc. The Millennials, (born between 1979 and 1996) like the car-free life style, Leinberger says. They'd rather use their cell phone and walk over to their girlfriend's house a mile away - only 50% of them plan on getting married, ever - than use the land line and drive the $30,000, 2,500 pound steel, glass, plastic and rubber tuber over to her house thirty-five minutes away. Taken together, Boomers and Millennials, says Leinberger, of them only 12% want to live in the car-dependent outback any more. And that is very significant.

He claims, but leaves it to our imagination how, the suburban fringe caused the mortgage collapse. The usual explanation is subprime mortgages getting artificially inflated into a massive bubble starting with original purchase, then migrating up stream to bundled derivatives to ever more risky gambling in the marketplace. Undoubtedly that was a large part of the problem, maybe most of it. I'd add gasoline prices to the payments for overpriced homes. Robert Scheer in his book "The Great American Stickup" adds greed run wild in Wall Street and both Republican and Democrat law makers and Federal administrations taking large Wall Street donations for political power, deregulating prudent controls on not just real estate but all forms of borrowing and debt in the US. Plus, I'd add, cars aren't that much fun any more, the tedium of driving and occasionally suffering some kind of accident and car repairs and so on. Even their colors - shades of gray, black, white with a smattering of red - are bor-ing compared to the happy rainbow of times when they flew from place to place with tail fins like airplanes and anyone getting into one became automatically several years younger and far more alluring.

Warren Karlenzig's essay goes into more details, but readers of this newsletter are familiar with most of them, on both the negative side - climate change, waste of land and energy, cost of gasoline, death on the highways and so on caused by the sprawling infrastructure of the thinly developed suburbs - and on the positive side - better bicycle and transit systems coming on strong, green belts being created, local foods gaining traction, renewable energy systems to match, rooftop greening and so on. All good information.

But what is most shocking in his "The Death of Sprawl" and therefore (alas) most enjoyable reading, is his tale of the surrealistic fall of Victorville, California, where rapid development of sprawl suddenly reversed in 2008. In the whole city the average house price dropped from $300,000 in 2007 to $120,000 in less than two years. In a fringe area one development project saw four recently completed houses no one would buy just sitting there unsold, while around them work summarily stopped on 12 other houses in the same project. I remember Victorville. It's in the broiling desert inhaling the smog backwash that heads up the canyon northeast of Los Angeles and through the gap in the mountains surrounding LA then to funnel through the thin scattering of new but desolate looking houses, many hundreds of them euphemistically called a town. Even more euphemistically, the real estate promoters and local papers have anointed the place "The Inland Empire" though the only thing I could imagine they could have conquered is a few lizards, jack rabbits and creosote bushes. The developer went bankrupt. The bank took over the buildings. The city government declared the place an attractive nuisance and threatened the bank with liability should anyone get hurt and declared it was about to charge the bank for fire service and security patrols. So the bank "assessed the hemorrhaging local real estate market and decided to cut its losses. A work crew was dispatched to rip the houses down and get what they could - money, beer, whatever - for the remains." (The beer was traded by some locals for scrap wood.)  

There just might be a general pattern toward these things conditions and realizations leading toward general economic slowdown as well as causing particular problems of sprawl development. First, sprawl development means you are stuck with all the above-mentioned simply because of the distances involved in that wildly inefficient layout. Urban form - flat, two dimensional - and layout should be the clear subject of discussion, along with that it means to build in a more three-dimensional arrangement. The basic concept is that complex living organisms are, shall we say, usefully analogous to cities with all their functions. Not just "housing" in the desert ripped out of an urban infrastructure to be cast out to great distances, but like living organisms, with all parts, all "organs" - present and well arranged for happy functioning. A community isn't just housing with garage, car and miles of asphalt ribbons snaking across the landscape. It's also jobs, shops, offices, schools, food, hardware and drug stores, restaurants, banks, churches, skate parks, clinics, train stations...

Bigger Problems

There are profound problems beyond the demographic likes and dislikes emphasized by Leinberger in his editorial in the New Yorker. One of them is what he cites cheerfully as higher values near centers that he and other developers see as a source of better, bigger business. But it is also a force against demographics like those he points out are shaping up in the Boomers and Millennials' generations. More on this shortly.

Second, we may be seeing the first of many expected signs of passing over the top of what's called Peak Oil and from now on, sliding down the post Peak Oil side of the graph of oil consumption: expect a suite of problems from rising fuel prices to simple shortages. We'll be seeing increasing of costs for everything, including building materials due to the distances involved, in time wasted, higher real price of labor - If workers can even afford the commutes themselves, costs to haul the logs out of the woods, run the saws and so on, replant and harvest future trees on ever more degraded soils, all that cheap energy delivers sliding away. Not only is it more tedious and expensive to commute one's body back and forth to the suburbs every day but building materials, furnishings, food, repair materials, yard things, repair items, friends who might want to visit - everything costs more in energy and money than in a compact center of high diversity. More expensive energy and more shortages in general means everything suffers a general increase in price, like the machine of civilization getting less and less grease with more and more sand blowing into the gears. This reality, symbolized and caused largely by rising energy prices, is not just sinking into our consciousness but leading to the physical changes Leinberger and Karlenzig report.

A third point to bear in mind is what might call the "product" (mathematical term) of various multipliers: climate change and related damage, shortages of everything per person just because numbers keep going up, plus consumption for a while, plus everyday dumping of what can't be recycled and pollution of a wide range of kinds, replacement of natural plants and animals with people, pets, pests and weeds with associated loss of "ecological services." What is called for here, that should enter the conversation, is the importance of looking at the total and holistic picture to get the picture right, to see and better understand the interrelation of parts and the relationship of the whole with its environment and resource base. As it clarifies greatly to see the city, town and village as analogous in important ways with complex living organisms, so it is very helpful and important to understand that negative factors multiply and hasten the destruction of the community and the whole planet's biosphere, in fact.

Perhaps most important of all is realizing that the whole city can be healthy if designed and built with this holistic sort of awareness. Urban civilization could be based on cities that build soils and protect and restore biodiversity as well as provide beautiful, vital places where people live and thrive. But we have to have the tools, beyond just the awareness that sprawl has hit, or is close to hitting, the wall.

Rising Values in and Near Centers NOT Good?

Read On  

Ecocity Insights

by Jennie Moore,

Director, Sustainable Development and Environmental Stewardship, British Columbia Institute of Technology

Car Free Journey

By Steve Atlas

I want to wish each of you a wonderful holiday season. During this past year, we have spotlighted areas you can visit for a weekend without driving. We plan to highlight more car-free getaway destinations where you can bike, walk, or use public transportation. Can you recommend any communities or vacation spots in the U.S. that visitors can enjoy without needing to drive? Send your suggestions to steveatlas45@yahoo.com.  

Charles B. Stockdale, writing in 24/7 Wall Street, has spotlighted the 10 best cities (in the United States) to live car-free. Here is the link: http://247wallst.com/2011/11/01/the-best-cities-to-live-in-car-free/.  

To compile this list of the best cities to live in without a car, 24/7 Wall St. examined the 100 largest metropolitan areas. Stockdale explains, "In each city, we looked at the percentage of neighborhoods covered

by public transit, the frequency of service for those neighborhoods and the share of jobs reachable within 90 minutes or less by public transit for people living in those neighborhoods, all provided by the Brookings Institution. We also looked at the "walk score" for the primary city of each metropolitan area, provided by research group Walk Score. This number represents how accessible amenities are for residents of a city on foot.  

Finally, we considered the percentage of commuters who bike to work, using data from the Census Bureau." According to Stockdale, the 10 best U.S. cities to live in car-free are:  

1) San Francisco-Oakland, CA;  

2) Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Oregon-Washington;

3) New York-Northern NJ-Long Island, NY-NJ-Pa;  

4) Honolulu, Hawaii;  

5) Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA;  

6) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA;  

7) Denver-Aurora, CO;  

8) Salt Lake City, Utah

9) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA; and  

10) Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA

San Francisco, California, one of the US cities where it's easy to live car free

This month's spotlight: New Orleans, LA.  

Read On