Call it what you may: Suburban sprawl is at an all-time high, and its effects on our modern society are beginning to show up in interesting ways. Can one make a case linking road-rage and commuting? Does a link exist between property values and the effect of long-term growth in suburban sprawl on public tax dollars? This short essay chronicles the sweeping array of variables that have dismembered our cities’ vital organs and makes a case for inner-city, urban-core development.
The effects are surprising: An estimated 200 million households in the U.S. (the U.S. Census Bureau cites more than 115 million households as defined by intake data, yet adjusted here to include non-traditional and emerging household types) are at an all-time risk of feeling insecure despite the increase in “new urbanism” communities. If there is such a thing as new urbanism, then what is old urbanism, and why is the new urbanism trying to replicate the most successful elements of the old one?
When I researched and prepared for this article in the labyrinth of Butler Library at Columbia University 15 years ago, I was awestruck at the calamity unfolding across cities and metropolises in every corner of our nation. My findings still resonate today with fact patterns that advise caution. The compilation of this report stems from a renewed sense of urgency and a rediscovery of its importance to the community.
While this report takes a critical look at our planning model, it in no way poses a sharp criticism of the myriad citizens who occupy suburbia. In a sense, they are the victims of a lack of choices offered to them. Who doesn’t want appealing housing in seamless, integrated locations that allow transportation options?
Studies have shown fewer people today want to commute compared to two generations ago — but this is not a so-called Millennial issue as it cuts across all age-groups. According to the data researched with various transportation agencies, including the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of New York City and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), commuters do not enjoy sitting in traffic, remaining motionless amongst hundreds of thousands of other anonymous vehicles. When was the last time you heard an office colleague or personal friend say, “I can’t wait to get on the road and get stuck in traffic?”
Why is this condition placed on our neurological and physical landscape? Why are the vast majority of wage earners in this country fixated on atoning for the one-hour commute to and from work? The answer is no one really wants this condition, but we acquiesce to it because of increasingly limited choices — the dynamics brought on by formulaic-driven and unsustainable development patterns.
Unsustainable development, for this report, is defined as development pattern that exacerbates traffic congestion and contribute significantly to energy consumption as opposed to energy conservation with unintended or intended consequences. It is also a type of development pattern that continues to segregate classes and race like never before. Some readers who own businesses or work in suburban areas may disagree with this idea, arguing that suburban sprawl is a necessary element of areas where work is available.
For the unsustainable suburban developer, notions of mixed use conjure the manipulation of monotonous, monochromatic communities that have been tweaked so slightly that if you were to squint, you still wouldn’t know where you were. In an unsustainable development, for instance, a pedestrian walking in the public right-of-way or a cyclist riding a bike in a dedicated bike-lane, are afterthoughts and will remain underutilized.
In these communities, access to social services via public, mass transit is much less likely than inside the urban core since they are often located on the fringe of cities. You cannot typically walk to nearby restaurants, grocery stores, shops, and cultural centers in an unsustainable development, because they are somewhere else that requires you to get into your automobile and drive.
So-called “new-urbanism” attempts to deal with such scarcity of community amenities, but its frail structure fails to address the main concern of creating nearby jobs, and it is simply reconstituted as suburban enclave, re-packaged and re-marketed, into more efficient sprawl.
In these newly disguised suburban communities, the nearest opportunity for low-skilled work is likely to be found at the fast-food joint in the food court of what used to be the big shopping mall (now the late ’50s, early ’60s throwback of the open-air strip center in the farthest of fringe-communities). This kind of employment doesn’t make a dent in the demand of our vital economies. Temporary jobs have long been considered by the U.S. Department of Labor as unsustainable and do not qualify as garnering the economic impact that long-term, full-time employment does to create truly livable communities. Creating employment centers should be a target for public policy officials and private sector engines in the “new urbanism” of the decades to come.
As the late comedian George Carlin once said, “The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways but narrower viewpoints. We spend more but have less, we buy more but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences but less time.”
This could aptly can be the screenplay for a film describing an unsustainable development pattern (or spark numerous TED talks to come).
Author’s Note: This article was researched and written in New York City in 2001, as inspired by my interaction with neighbor Lance Jay Brown of the architectural faculty at CCNY whilst living in West Harlem, Hamilton Heights. Variations of the research and watercolor were also published March 2008 and May 2010 in BUILDERnews Magazine.
*Featured/top image: From Smart Growth America’s Measuring Sprawl 2014 report.
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There is a much discussed movement nationally wherein people are eschewing the suburbs and returning to the city. It is documented and clear in many cities across the country. Many people have come to realize that they often simply swap one set of problems for another, not the least of which is incessant traffic and the unavoidable result of calculating what percentage of your life you are spending sitting in a car. And that the lure of cheaper and bigger is somewhat of an illusion. Everyone gets to make that choice, but more and more people are coming to that conclusion. Add that to the increased pressure for the suburbs to pay their own way and not be subsidized in ways that have been hidden for too long by the rest of the metro area, as well as burgeoning infrastructure costs for systems built often with a limited lifespan (aka cheap materials or not properly planned) and never ending roadway expansion and reconfiguration. At any rate, this trend does not seem to have come to San Antonio yet, but I think it will. It speaks, perhaps, to the notion that San Antonio lags behind trends nationally, a subject of much healthy debate around town as to if and why that is true. If so, perhaps San Antonio meds to embrace why it is so often behind the curve and to figure out if we want to move with the contemporary trends in a more expeditious way, and what it takes to make that happen.
You make a good point about lack if diversity in suburban areas. In planned communities, houses of a similar value a lumped together. Basically, everyone in a neighborhood is at a similar socioeconomic level. In urban areas, there is diversity both economic and racial. For example, I live in a single-family home within the original boundaries of San Antonio (2 leagues from San Fernando Catherdral). There are perhaps a dozen homes on my block. The rest are duplexes, 4-plexes, and even a 10-unit apartment building. The result is an interesting and diverse community. The problem with new urbanism is that is still tends to be homogenous socioeconomically — at least in San Antonio — which is why it has not become more popular. We’re still building the same old suburbs, further and further from the urban core, with no consideration of the viability of these communities in the long term. Have you been out to Alamo Ranch lately…?
Serendipity, chance, divine intervention–are just a few ways cities begin: no one controlled where the Tiber River would flow through Rome, say, 1 million years ago–that was performed by Mother Nature. Like the Tiber, a river runs through San Antonio’s core…and its connection to economics is underscored by new policies directed toward re-invigorating downtown. That SA lags behind national trends, in my view, is a great thing; that alone is alluring and authentic. And SA, from its foundation, has embraced diversity in ways other typical American cities do not. What is old does become new again…and readers will have an opportunity to explore ideas to be published in Part 2. Stay tuned–Rp
New urbanism, with high density downtowns linked by mass transit, is not taking off here on the west coast. For example, the Puget Sound Regional Council, which plans future growth for the Seattle area, designated about a dozen regional growth centers, with mixed use commercial and residential, with retail shops on the first floor.
Many of these retail shops have not rented, and condos have dropped their prices, due to bankruptcy and lack of demand.
Worldwide, new cities of the future will not feature high density downtowns. Instead, they will fit the Los Angeles and Phoenix models, where the downtown is relegated to minimal importance, and the suburbs have distinct identities, attracting a diversity of residents and employers to different types of suburbs. In contrast to downtown new urbanist centers, these suburbs are low density and covered with trees and open space.
However, in contrast to the high density regional growth centers in Seattle, these suburbs around LA are of lower density, such as LA suburbs of Irvine and Thousand Oaks, or, Scottsdale as a suburb of Phoenix. One third of the city limits of both Thousand Oaks and Scottsdale are open space, and Scottsdale’s regional desert preserve, when it is completed with trails, will be the nation’s largest urban preserve.
Cities within high density downtowns and urban growth boundaries also face repeated boom and bust economies, since home and condo prices rise disproportionately to other areas, due to the urban growth boundary causing land rationing and consequential land inflation.
Then, prices fall when the housing market crashes, only to quickly rise again as they are in California. Right now, the median rent for a one bedroom apartment in Seattle is well over $1500. What is it in San Antonio?
If one wants smart growth in the urban core, it’s best to do this in expanding cities with low density urban sprawl at the fringe, not constrained by urban growth boundaries that increase rents and home prices, with market volatility. Look at suburban Phoenix. Tempe, or Scottsdale, Arizona, where they have principles of smart growth in their downtowns, yet the entire Phoenix, Arizona metro is expanding rapidly with low density urban sprawl at the fringe. The median rent within “downtown Tempe or Scottsdale” for a one bedroom apartment is about $800. Therefore it is cheaper to attend Arizona State University (Tempe) than the University of Washington (Seattle).
Southern California also has expensive rents and real estate market volatility, because some of the suburbs have urban growth boundaries, and certain counties are anti-growth, i.e. they don’t want any growth, or they limit their rate of growth (i.e. Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties), but that’s another story.
San Antonio defines the word sprawl. “New Urbanism”, while trying to modify the codified “sub-urban” planning model, does not go directly to urban densities. San Francisco is an urban place (read as 3-8 stories plus the midrises) and needs to modify some of the theoretical models, because the normal concept of American density does not work there. Try to leave your car somewhere in San Antonio and see if you can make through the entire day without it.