Pack 'em in

by John

Matt Yglesias thinks he's found the solution to the problems that declining home prices and the rising price of fuel are creating for those in rural areas: just depopulate the countryside.* He links to Ryan Avent:

Basically, we need more places that look kind of like the District–dense, walkable, with good transit access. And if we focus on building those places in areas with dynamic economies, then we’ll solve multiple problems at a stroke.

Shudder. My father-in-law, a grumpy Fairfax County resident who has figured before in my discussion of issues like this one, moved to Northern Virginia in the early 1980s, when it was anything but the gray, sprawling pseudo-metropolis that it is today. Every time I see him, he complains about the incessant development -- the crowded roads, the encroaching pavement, the inability to find a place where you can sit down and have some peace and quiet. He's right. The worst thing, though, is that the vast majority of this development is ugly: huge, clunky islands of cement with no sense of proportion and little connection to place aside from the role they play in contributing to the area's "dynamic economy".

Yglesias and Avent, of course, are talking about the District -- a place which, I am told, is quickly becoming a less miserable pit of awfulness than it was when I used to live there. Perhaps so. But what, pray tell, are we going to do with people with large or even large-ish families, or those who, perhaps for strange reasons having something to do with a desire for clean air and open space, a dislike of having neighbors looming over them, or perhaps a strange and sentimental connection to farming or rural living, have little inclination to move to higher-density areas or have their present hometowns become even more dense than they already are? And what, for that matter, is going to happen to farming, and to the other slices of our national economy which, though perhaps less than "thriving", help to provide the food we eat and the stuff we use? Rural and small-town America isn't going away any time soon, and as hard as it might be for those who pack five at a time into Florida Avenue rowhouses to understand, there are reasons for this that go beyond the merely inertial.

The real problem, then, is that most of the areas where people are emitting the most carbon per capita and spending the largest portions of their income on gasoline are ones where urbanist solutions are maximally unlikely to work. In the first place, as I have already mentioned, such areas tend to be those in which the local economies are not "thriving", and it seems a bit cold-hearted to suggest that we pursue economic policies that will turn large portions of the American landscape into ghost towns. Secondly, though, the residents of e.g. Southwest Texas and Eastern Wyoming are sure to be even less pleased than my fabled father-in-law with proposals to turn their hometowns into mini-Cambridges, and I'll happily defend their right to hold off the developers at the point of a shotgun.

Having defended urbanism before against the charge that cities are unfriendly to familial and other forms of healthy living, I don't want to make myself seem more unsympathetic to all of this than I really am. I love living, and raising my family, in a high-density, pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly suburb with good public transportation, tiny backyards, and lots of public parks, and I wish that more people, and especially more parents, would see the virtues of such a style of life. And I'm by no means unsympathetic to the idea that we should get rid of policies that encourage the spread of shoddy, gas-guzzling, exurban tract housing. But promoting higher-density living to turn poor, high-emissions rural folks into better-to-do light rail-riding urbanites is not the thing that is going to make our carbon problem, let alone the sociocultural baggage that keeps us from solving it, go away any time soon.

* An unfair gloss, I know, but hey - it's the Internet.

[ADDENDUM: More here, in response to comments from Matt Frost and Ryan Avent.]

(Cross-posted at Upturned Earth.)

Comments

[ryan]

There is an enormous difference between suggesting that we might want more dense places, in order to accommodate the latent demand for such living suggested by high relative housing prices in those places, and declaring that everyone MUST LIVE in dense places.

I personally don't care where people live, so long as suburbanites pay for the negative externalities resulting from their way of life, and so long as we appropriately fund the aspects of urban life, like transit, that produce significant positive externalities.

And I see no reason why increasing the share of walkable urban development relative to auto-oriented suburban development should have any impact on small towns or rural farming communities, except to reduce the amount of exurban farmland plowed under for tract housing.

[Brandon]

"The real problem, then, is that most of the areas where people are emitting the most carbon per capita and spending the largest portions of their income on gasoline are ones where urbanist solutions are maximally unlikely to work"

This is where I disagree. This whole discussion brings to mind hundreds of square miles of suburban Southern California (LA, Orange, San Diego county) as the type of area which would benefit from the idea. It's not rural, it's moderate density; people generally live a great distance from their work and use long commutes that are very gas-intensive, cities are poorly planned (commercial areas miles from residential areas instead of mixed residential/commercial) and even administration of public services (trash collection, etc) requires running trucks over long distances.

I don't think anyone is seriously proposing increased urban density as a solution for rural areas.

[new urbanist critic]

I'm not the slightest bit convinced that higher density living promotes a healthier lifestyle or reduces the amount of gasoline we use or reduces the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Urban planners unfortunately come from a discipline that is really just one fad after another. I do agree that we need to reduce the amount of gasoline we use and that we need to care about what pollutants we dump into the atmosphere, but I have always suspected that the thoughts of the New Urbanism that have been written about in the past few years would not help to clean up the environment.

Does higher density living really reduce the use of cars and gasoline? Every high density city has a much bigger carbon footprint than any small town or rural area or even a suburb. I am not saying that suburbs are without criticism, but the new urbanists and their like spew out the propoganda that city living is the ideal and we all must live in high density areas. I would like to see real hard factual evidence that high density living really reduces the amount of gasoline we use, because right now I am not convinced.
Cities have mixed use development - that is, they have residential houses right next to businesses such as grocery stores. One might think that this would reduce the use of gasoline because people would be able to walk to the grocery store. But, each of those small stores has to be stocked and this requires continual truck shipments. The major problem with traffic in a place like New York City is not that people are driving to work, but that there is a tremendous amount of continuall truck traffic. And this can cause the air to be tremedously polluted - the South Bronx has the highest rate of asthma in the country and this is directly connected to truck traffic on the Bruckner boulevard. Now, the suburbs have traffic problems too, so I'm not arguing here that suburbs are better than cities. I'm simply saying that living in high density places does not improve the environment in any way. Given the amount of traffic in your typical large city, how can the new urbanists really think that high density populations will solve our environmental problems?

I wonder if these people who praise high density living have really lived in high density? In many ways, it is extremely unpleasant and can be unhealthy, given the pollution from traffic. And one of the largest drawbacks to high density living is the incessant NOISE - from traffic, from busses and transit lines, from neighbors, from living next to mixed use buildings such as a rowdy bar. Who wants to come home from work at the end of a long day, only to be confronted with the constant footfall from your neighbors living above you? Another unpleasant aspect of living in a high density area is the lack of privacy - your own private space is constantly intruded upon by traffic, by noise. The new urbanists attempt to design houses and living spaces so as to "promote a sense of community" This sounds like an attempt at social engineering to me and I do not think it is possible or desireable to control a community based on architecture. Good communities are based on individuals respectiing one another, and they cannot come about as a result of a certain type of architecture. And I object to being told to " have a sense of community" What if someone really doesn't want to participate in any community? We should allow people to be free to choose however they want to live, and we should not be forced to value "community" ( whatever that it - I got it off the new urbanists web site)

The New Urbanists often talk of mass transit as thought it is the main solution to solving our environmental problems. But they never really give a full rational argument as to HOW mass transit will solve our traffic/environmental problems? Everyone intuitively assumes that mass transit will solve our problems. I challenge the new urbanists to show me a city where mass transit has really reduced the flow of traffic. Every city with extensive mass transit ALSO has clogged traffic. This does not mean that mass transit causes clogged traffic anymore than it means that mass transit reduces clogged traffic. We cannot make such simplistic conclusions, and we need to be careful about making any causal connections between mass transit and traffic flow. Historically, mass transit has come about as a necessity in most large US cities- it was not the result of urban planners trying to be green. The reason a city like New York City has mass transit is that the city would come to a complete gridlock without it. But that doesn't mean that the NYC subway is a solution to environmental problems. With the subway running at its peak, there is already too much traffic congestion in NYC. So our traffic congestion problems are not going to be solved by more subways. Mass transit, while a good thing, will not solve our traffic congestion problems. Also, as I have mentioned, most of the traffic problems in NYC are caused by truck traffic for transporting goods, garbage, recycling, ect. This traffic will not be reduced by increased subway building or riding.

[Maverick Tribe]

New Urbanist Critic: you're entitled to your own opinions about the desirability of city living, but you're not entitled to your own facts. The fact is, the average person who lives and works in Manhattan leads one of the most energy-efficient, least environmentally destructive lives in American life today. If New York City were its own state, it would rank 51st in per capita energy use. So your statement that "living in high density places does not improve the environment in any way" is simply wrong and wholly refuted by the evidence. You say you want hard facts and a rational argument? You could start here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/10/18/041018fa_fact_owen

Also, you're conflating the aggregate environmental impact of high density living with the traffic congestion that you observe in those areas. The presence of traffic and its attendent air and noise pollution are more persistant and driven by a more complex set of forces, which I won't get into here. But the fact that moving trips from cars to public transit is greener and less consumptive on the aggregate is beyond dispute.

[greg]

Isn't density good for preserving farming and farmland? Isn't one of the biggest threats to farmland the fact that it's constantly being gobbled up by suburban encroachment?

[John]

Greg,

Of course it is. But - unless you want to turn everything over to the machines - you still need people to farm the land, and they at least should be able to get around at costs that aren't artificially inflated. There's also an important distinction, as you note, between suburban sprawl and rural living, and it's primarily the latter (though usually in areas where there are no suburbs to encroach) that I was arguing for the importance of preserving, or at least not driving out of existence through inflated fuel costs and pro-density measures.

[Freedom Lover]

Most of you high density lovers are quite amusing. At what point in your thought process did you take it upon yourself to determine how others should live. The folks in suburbia or in rural communities don't spend their time thinking about the wrong ways in which you live.

Secondly, its about time you got off the too much gas kick. Burn it all you want and drill for more. As technology develops, it will eventually replace gasoline, but in the meantime, drill, pump and burn baby.

[Jarrett]

The causes of urban traffic congestion are not as complex as Maverick suggests. Congestion is the obvious result of underpricing. When you offer free tickets for a concert, you're going to see a long line, made up of people who are happy to pay in time rather than money. That's what traffic gridlock is: cars trying to use an intrinsically expensive facility * for free, and therefore inevitably paying in time what they're refusing to (or are not allowed to) pay in money. Congestion charges such as London's are the only solution to urban congestion that has actually worked, because they're the only one based on a correct diagnosis of the problem.

As a professional mass transit planner, I NEVER EVER claim that a transit project will reduce congestion. Plenty of politicians have gotten in trouble succumbing to that lazy populist claim. What transit does is permit more people to have a better quality of life, and more economic activity, at a given level of congestion. In the absence of correct pricing, there will always be as much congestion as drivers are willing to tolerate.

*We're not talking here just about the cost of building a road or street or parking lot, but more importantly the value of the real estate required for those things, which in a city is very high indeed.

[Paulc]

As a former two-term public official in Northern California, environmentalist, I have been active in a split amongst environmentalists in which many of us see "density" and Transit-oriented living as huge land-use fraud, advocated by well meaning bureaucrats and exploited by developers.

You cannot replicate pre-auto era land use patterns in post-auto era areas, particular in the Western US. People drive; developers maximize profits using pro-forma models that presume maximal auto use -- e.g fully parked residential complexes and big-box retail.

Texas Transportation Institute data makes clear that auto congestion correlates directly with both population and city size, and that wasted fuel correlates directly with congestion.

Most people making claims about this "solution" just make something up in their minds with "common sense" rather than visiting large nationwide databases such as the TTI traffic database and the Us Census database.

The same people that needed a hugely complicated computer model to both prove climate change, and mankind's contribution, now think they can invent a solution called "new urbanism" without also using a complicated modeling system to see if it really solves the problem.

I suggest it does not, and that the biggest problem with addressing climate change is that many environmentalists are using it as an excuse to re-invigorate their pet policies that have little or no effect on reducing emissions.

Originally, "new urbanism" solved a different "problem" -- urban sprawl. Now it is being re-invigorated and resold as a solution to global warming.

In very many ways, my brothers on the eco-LEFT are selling us a beautiful fiction called "new urbanism" in much the same way as the neo-con RIGHT sold us the beautiful fiction of democracy in Iraq.

Its bullshit. In practice, TOD housing developments rarely succeed in reducing auto trips or unit prices.

The latest one we fought and lost against in Palo Alto was over-parked, produced significant congestion impacts on local streets, according to mandated impact reports, and units have sold for an average of $1.2M and higher.

[Jerry Brennan]

So let me get this straight...if the economy is worse in rural areas, and those are the places where people have the hardest times finding jobs, and those are the places where people spend the most on gas, we should pursue policies that keep people living out there because...why, exactly?

I'm not saying we shouldn't have a vibrant countryside, but I think people should move where it makes economic sense for them to live. (I'm not telling anyone where to live, mind you, I'm just saying what seems to me to be the wisest course.) And if it doesn't make economic sense for people to live out in the country, why try and keep them there? Why not, instead, Better ghost towns in the country than decaying urban areas.

[vc]

In response to Jerry Brennan: right on. This comment bears repeating: "There is an enormous difference between suggesting that we might want more dense places, in order to accommodate the latent demand for such living suggested by high relative housing prices in those places, and declaring that everyone MUST LIVE in dense places.

I personally don't care where people live, *so long as suburbanites pay for the negative externalities resulting from their way of life*, and so long as we appropriately fund the aspects of urban life, like transit, that produce significant positive externalities.

And I see no reason why increasing the share of walkable urban development relative to auto-oriented suburban development should have any impact on small towns or rural farming communities, except to reduce the amount of exurban farmland plowed under for tract housing."