Summer in the City

Reihan Salam had a post the other day where he said "the vocal, influential segments of the center-left are turning against the suburban way of life in quite explicit terms, usually though certainly not exclusively on environmental grounds." Clearly, there's always been a kind of aesthetic critique of suburbia out there (and always will be) just as there are various aesthetic and quasi-aesthetic forms of critique and praise for the countryside and the big city, I think it's wrong to see the rising tide of interest in urbanism as primarily driven by anti-suburban sentiment.

The main direction in which the environmental critique goes, I think, is that there's a large environmental critique of unchecked growth in carbon emissions. Consequently, there's an interest in policies aimed at capping the quantity of carbon emitted in the United States and reducing that cap over time. It's natural enough that this would lead, in turn, to a growth of interests in ways to make reductions of that scale feasible. Reducing the number of families operating on a "one car per person over the age of 15" model and increasing the number of families operating on a "we rent a car when we need one" model. That would involve, yes, a lower proportion of the population living in suburbs.

But it would also -- and probably more importantly -- involve more people living in somewhat different kinds of suburbs. Lots of eminently suburban places feature commuter rail stations or even full-fledged metro/subway outlets. There could be more places like that, and the places that already have it could have more frequent service so it'd be a more appealing option for a larger number of trips. Meanwhile, America has become such an overwhelmingly suburban country that the concept of a "suburb" has ceased to define anything incredibly definite. A suburb can have sidewalks, bike paths, and market-priced parking while parts of many cities are, in practice, difficult to navigate without a car even without huge distances being involved.

On top of all this, we're just past the great urban crisis years of the 1970s and 80s. These days, I worry much less that America's great cities will be rendered unviable than that the urban lifestyle is unaffordable for too many people. If you look at housing prices it's clear that "home in a walkable urban area close to a quality mass transit system" is a product that's in very high demand. Nobody needs to do anything to convince more people to want to live in situations like that. What's needed is for the price of situations like that to be cheap enough for more people to get them. That means some combination of allowing developers to build more units (taller buildings, laxer parking requirements) close to mass transit stations and building more mass transit stations.

The upshot of a situation like that wouldn't be to kill off suburbs at all. Rather, by draining the suburbs of people who actually would prefer to live elsewhere, what'll be left is a situation wherein people who prefer suburbia can more easily afford to live in the very best bits of it rather than in far-flung areas with bad commutes.

Photo by Flickr user OmarOmar used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

Admirable piece, but the photo is from Fresno, which isn't any kind of suburb that I know of. It's also typical of strip malls in lots of little Western small rural or semi-rural towns that I do know of. The great urban crisis of the 70's (actually I'd date the start before that) may be long over, but these places continue in crisis.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | March 13, 2008 11:29 AM

In that post, Salam also quotes Barone conflating suburbs with exurbs.

Increasing Democratic strength in traditional suburbs is a symptom of members of "the center-left [who] are turning against the suburban way of life," in part because the "suburban way of life" has become an exurban way of life. Those choosing inner-ring suburbs are doing so for the cultural/lifestyle reasons one associates with the "center-left."

Posted by Tyro | March 13, 2008 11:36 AM

Amen Matt.

I don't want to be forced into a suburb (I have a young child not in school yet)--those people even hate sidewalks for christsakes!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/11/AR2008031102893_pf.html

Posted by David | March 13, 2008 11:50 AM

The post you link to seems awfully myopic--the real threat to the suburban way of life is $100 oil, not the supposed hostility of the center-left.

Posted by Sean | March 13, 2008 11:55 AM

Relative to carbon profiles, what is the contribution of automobiles to carbon production relative to coal burning power plants? The biggest threat to the global environment is the production of electricity by burning coal in China, India, and the US. Reducing automobile usage isn't going to make much of a dent.

Posted by SLC | March 13, 2008 12:04 PM

Don't know about worldwide, but in the USA, CO2 emissions from automobiles are about 60 percent of the emissions from coal. But the thing is that capturing CO2 emissions from coal power plants will be much easier than capturing CO2 emissions from automobiles (stationary vs. non-stationary emissions).

src: http://epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads/08_Annex_2.pdf

it's on page 4.

Posted by yoyoyo | March 13, 2008 12:14 PM

Demand may be high in certain urban areas but not in others. I live in midwestern city near two bus lines, but the demand here isn't high because of the high number of rental properties and all the potential negatives that those entail. I think over time that will change - certainly w/ $4/gallon gas it will - and these rental properties (mostly houses and duplexes) will get sold to buyers who'll live in them. But until then the rental dynamic is going to limit demand.

Posted by Kurzbein | March 13, 2008 12:17 PM

"That would involve, yes, a lower proportion of the population living in suburbs."

Hardly the exclusive solution. Electric vehicles, and/or a large scale increase in telecomuting would also permit considerable decreases in CO2 emissions without demanding that everybody huddle in urban warrens.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | March 13, 2008 12:19 PM

I think the dirty little secret of suburbia is that in some places, there is decent mass transit in suburbia. When I lived in the suburbs on the west side of Portland, for example, I deliberately chose an apartment complex that was only a couple of minutes from the light rail stop, so I could go to work in downtown Portland.

Many suburbs may become unlivable because of high gas prices, but that should stimulate the growth and expansion of suburban public transit, rather than being all pessimistic and gloomy about suburbia.

Posted by Amanda Clark | March 13, 2008 12:20 PM

I think there isn't a clear distinction being made between suburbs and exurbs. As a DC-area resident who lives in Arlington I consider places like Alexandria, Arlington and Fairfax County as suburbs. For the most part there isn't room for new development in those places the way there is in Loudon and Prince William County (two fast growing counties).

It's exurban residents who move their because housing is more affordable and the public school systems are pretty good. The backlash from those residents is over increased congestion, long commutes and a local government who won't say no to new development and finances it by increasing rates for utilities. Residents are starting to tell local officials that home builders and developers are going to have to shoulder more of the load in financing new construction. Maybe what is going on is people want elements of an urban lifestyle without actually living there--the Clarendon area of Arlington comes to mind.

Posted by Ben | March 13, 2008 12:22 PM

I'll point out that ring suburbs surrounding a major city which people commute into for work and suburubs that aren't linked to a large urban core are very different in environmental impact. Ring suburbs are bad for the the environment because people take long commutes into the city - I used to do this when I lived around Baltimore, commuting 45 min every day from the suburbs to downtown. Now I live in the even less dense suburbs of a 200,000 person city in the midwest and commute 5 min to work because the businesses are spread out in office parks rather than being concentrated downtown.

The myopic part of recomending higher densities as a panacea for commuting pollution, is that when you hit a critical mass of density, you start getting ring suburbs around the dense area with people commuting into the dense development for work. The problem is development that follows the core model which separates people from their places of work so they spend large amounts of time commuting every day, and often for leasure as well. Encouraging urbanization is counter-productive if it leads to the creation of more cities with core/ring dynamics.

Posted by MattXIV | March 13, 2008 12:33 PM

I think Matt's argument is a good one but it doesn't do much to get at Reihan's point. It would be one thing if we saw some kind of larger environmental commitment in American 'cities,' like say you see in Toronto - but I think that with a few exceptions we don't really see that. The environmental virtue of most of our cities seems to me to be pretty incidental. People live in the cities for the much more immediate, satiating pleasures - and this is the same reason they disdain the suburbs.

But let's be honest: when people celebrate cities they're talking about our major cities - not cities in general. Getting people to live in 'cities' isn't going to be about making rent cheaper in dc or nyc - it's going to be about making places like Pittsburgh and KC easier places to live.

Posted by berger | March 13, 2008 12:51 PM

The Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis has a show right now in which artist and urbanists consider suburbia.
http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/
It includes work by Julia Christensen, an artist who studies how communities make-use of big-box stores after their original builder moves on (as they almost inevitably do).
http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/Artist/JuliaChristensen

Posted by erik | March 13, 2008 1:24 PM

MattXIV makes a reasonable point, but I believe it is incorrect. Places with widely dispersed suburbs do not always, or even usually, mean that people live near their office and have short commutes.

The reality is that it's easier to change jobs than move houses. People change jobs often, often not by choice. And particularly if you've got kids in school who you do not want yank out, a new job in a more distant location in the sprawl means a commute. That's particularly true in a household with two working adults, because the chances of finding two appropriate jobs near their house are slim.

Higher density does tend to mean shorter distances between homes and jobs than lower density. It's true mathematically. Also, higher density enables transit, which is not viable in less dense areas. Admittedly, it is also true that higher density usually means more traffic and thus longer commuting time per-mile, but I think that the suggestion that lower-density suburbs mean less overall commute time is simply incorrect.

Posted by Oaktown | March 13, 2008 1:25 PM

More rational land use policies and, yes, restrictions (sorry, Houston) are one of the best tools we have for not just improving our environment, but limiting oil dependence.

You quite simply should not be allowed to develop shopping, industrial or commercials properties that can only be accessed by automobile. There's nothing wrong with suburbs, per se, of the type that you see around some of the larger, older cities in this country. Pre-war suburbs with real main streets and convenient access to jobs downtown via LIRR and Metro North in NYC, Metra in Chicago, the DC Metro, etc are perfectly sensible. But it is absolute idiocy to allow developers to build hundreds of thousands of homes whose residents can't buy a gallon of milk without a 10-minute drive in their SUV.

Posted by TH | March 13, 2008 1:39 PM

On the flip side, the government will probably never get away with telling people where they can and can't build their homes. But it is perfectly reasonable to introduce land use restrictions that say you cannot build an office park for 5,000 workers on a 100-acre site along an exurban highway. You zone so that the suburb has its own little downtown, with a cluster of office buildings, shops, etc, ideally around a suburban railway station. People do want this - which is why suburbs with commuter rail are almost invariably more expensive than those without, due to pent up demand (see Chicago's North Shore, for instance).

We should also abolish suburban zoning requirements that specify minimum lot sizes. If demand dictates that a place should have more units per acre, the market should be able to respond to that.

Posted by TH | March 13, 2008 1:45 PM

"We should also abolish suburban zoning requirements that specify minimum lot sizes."

This is absolutely critical. Zoning is a perfect example of an anti-free-market government initiative that liberals can hate. The point of zoning should be to keep someone from building a polluting or noisy business next to your house, not to protect you from living next to people with a lower income. As noted above, there is tremendous demand for urban housing, even among people who have a choice (i.e. can afford one car per person), but supply is artificially restricted.

Posted by applecor | March 13, 2008 2:16 PM

Interesting stuff here. I would like to point out a few things: as was mentioned, not all suburbs are the same. The older suburbs like Oak Park Illinois and St. Claire Shores Michigan follow the traditional urban grid model, and are therefore at least in theory walkable and servicable by mass transit (Oak Park is serviced by mass transit). Newer developments like Stockton California and Auburn Hills Michigan are not built around grids. Rather, there is no center commerical road, sometimes no sidewalk, winding twisting roads that are not condusive to mass transit at all. So perhaps a delineation for suburbs should be in the generation it was built, or for more precision the style (grid vs cul de sac).

Second, one problem with the suburbs vs core city dichotomy is that core cities are no longer able to grow to meet that demand. While Matt is correct that increasing housing costs can be met through upward development, core cities are no longer able to develop outward as they once were. Cities once expanded through annexation. That no longer happens, and that is a huge problem.

Posted by freddiemac | March 13, 2008 2:20 PM

Since WW II, the government, working with "private enterprise", has told us where we can build our houses. In general, you can build your house where there are roads, power, and, usually sewers and fire hydrants. In many cases these costs have been imposed on earlier residents by latecomers.

This all benefited the largest landowners in the area, who merrily shortplatted and sold with no regard for what happened next, creating instant slums that polluted streams and groundwater supplies with sewage, and had no police or fire protection.

This is how we come to minimum lot size requirements that are intended to keep the sewage load within the filtering capacity of septic systems, and concentrate population in smaller urban areas that can be economically served by fire and police forces.

In western Washington state, Weyerhauser and other developers have been trying to prove that "the market" can actually translate "demand" into a down payment that pays the real costs of development. A lot of people who live near these developments still think they are being stuck with the costs of the newcomers, and they may be right. It is far from clear to me that ELF was actually the arsonist in Snohomish County recently- there are other people out there who are sick of new developments.

In any case, it was all hustle and jive- life in suburbia generally sucked, and the most likely reason someone would want to move to the city would be that they grew up in suburbia.

Posted by serial catowner | March 13, 2008 2:35 PM

MattXIV,

Wouldn't it be reasonable to suggest that those office parks in low density zoning are going to eventually be clogged with the same sort of polluting traffic that core cities face?

It seems more reasonable to suggest that, instead of zoning low density and making a completely car dependent society, we add mass transit to the core city so that commuters like yourself can take the subway into downtown Baltimore.

I say this because I have seen low density commuting. I have lived in a low density midwestern suburb that was 20-30 years old and filled with cul-de-sacs and office parks. The commute to get from one place to another took 30 minutes of stop and go traffic. This is almost exclusively the type of development that was created since the 60s, and it is a very wasteful, oil dependent, car centric way to live. And it is rather myopic to think that low population low density won't become high population congestion, that it will just stay the same.

Posted by freddiemac | March 13, 2008 2:36 PM

It is not just cars, but also airplanes/airports.

Large airports are geographic concentrators, in ways that rail nets are not.

In the Bos-NY-Phila-Balt-Wash mega-opolis, and in the Chicago-Pittsburgh Mega and the Southern California Mega and in the Texas Mega, growing the rail net at the expense, not of autos, per se, but airplanes and airports, would change inter-city land values and options for locating economic activity.

Moving to a fast, dense rail net might actually revive parts of suburbia, which would be remade at greater density, but with some very attractive amenities.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | March 13, 2008 2:52 PM

freddiemac,

Intra-surburban commutes can be long in some cases, but the data suggests that suburban to urban commutes are substantially longer.

Take a look at the census data on commutes. The top 3 states are Maryland (DC and Baltimore suburbs), New York (NYC suburbs), New Jersey (NYC suburbs). Low population density and a lack of large urban centers seems fairly strongly correlated with a lower average commute.

Posted by MattXIV | March 13, 2008 3:25 PM

MattXIV,

The data you cite is interesting but doesn't really support your point because it doesn't give any suburb-to-suburb commuting information to compare. Obviously, folks in the NY and DC metro areas face big commutes. But a lot of those commutes, especially in New Jersey and in Northern Virginia, are suburb to suburb rather than suburb to city center.

Florida also has the 10th worst commute, though it is hardly the model of dense urban cores.

These data certainly don't suggest that sprouting a bunch of exurbs far from city centers is the solution to our congestions problem, nor is relatively better than density-increasing infill solutions, which I understand to be your contention.

Posted by Oaktown | March 13, 2008 5:26 PM

Re yoyoyo

I am very suspicious of anything coming out of EPA, given the politicization of that agency under the current administration. However, it is clear that the statement that more emissions are derived from automobiles then from burning coal is incorrect. The table indicates 2065.3 in non-obvious units from coal and 1228.2 in equally non-obvious units from motor vehicles, presumably passenger cars. The contribution from trucks and diesel powered freight trains is 650.4, again in non-obvious units. However, I would argue that one should include the contribution of CO(2) from diesel powered freight trains transporting coal in the contribution from coal which is unknown as it is not broken out separately.

However, the problem in China and probably India is much worse as their electricity requirements are rising rapidly and are being mostly met by coal burning power plants.

The issue of sequestration is not at all settled relative to whether it can be accomplished at a reasonable price. It would seem that the biggest bang for the buck would be replacement of coal burning power plants with other fuels with a smaller carbon footprint (e.g. natural gas) or nuclear power plants. Controlled fusion appears to be at least 30 years away if ever.

Posted by SLC | March 13, 2008 5:45 PM

I thought I would jump in to add that Matt's assumption that the environmental critique of the suburb is primarily about pollution from cars is not at all accurate. There are many other impacts that suburbs have on the environment aside from traffic related pollution. There is also the energy related pollution from the houses themselves. A high rise apartment building is more energy efficient than a stand alone house for a number of reasons. For example because the envelop of the individual units that is exposed to the outside per unit is smaller, it's heating and cooling loads are smaller. Also, as some of the other commenters have noted, the suburb as a development type has existed (to simplify for the purpose of this discussion) in this country since the end of WWII, newer suburbs feature houses that have much larger sq ft/person ratios. As houses become larger, they become less efficient to heat and cool. Another enormous impact relates to water in a bunch of ways. Suburbs negatively impact the watershed by replacing natural plants that store water and are suited to their environment with lawns, which are invasive monocultures that don't absorb water as efficiently and lead to increased run-off. And of course, since these lawns are not natural to their environment, they often must be watered. This water comes from the suburb's potable water supply. It is the same water we use to drink and shower with, and it's terribly wasteful. Water use is threatening to become a serious problem in this country, just look at Atlanta. And then there's the impact of all the new roads and infrastructure suburbs require. Roads cause heat islands, as wells as run-off. Denser development means less miles of new roads per person, less linear feet of new pipe and electrical lines, etc. In general, the more dense the development, the more efficiently it uses public services like water, power, and transportation infrastructure. Again, the high rise example is worth mentioning. A high rise with x number of people is more environmentally friendly because the structure of the building, the building envelope (skin), and much of the services (power, water, etc), are shared. The same number of people in a bunch of detached houses would requier duplicates of much of this material. The extraction, processing, transportation and installation of this redundant material has negative environmnetal impacts at every step. I use this example not to argue that everyone should live in high-rises, but to show that the denser the development, the more environmentally friendly it is.

I also want to point out something that does't get mentioned in discussions like this but is worth pointing out: replacing a green field (land that has never been developed) with development is not good for that land from an environmental standpoint. But, also, it is not an either or proposition, with new suburbs on previously undeveloped land on the one hand, and more high-rises in NYC on the other. Most suburbs are extremely inefficient, and in general they are filled with opportunities for in-fill development.

Posted by Jason | March 13, 2008 6:35 PM

"I think it's wrong to see the rising tide of interest in urbanism as primarily driven by anti-suburban sentiment.... The main direction in which the environmental critique goes, I think, is that there's a large environmental critique of unchecked growth in carbon emissions."

From these two sentences it's hard to tell, but is MY saying that main reason for increased interest in urban living is due to environmental concerns?

Cuz that's crazy talk. No way he could believe that. It's more about people choosing what they think is a better, more interesting life. Not just aesthetics, but coolness.

And it's about commute times sucking so hard.

Posted by luci | March 13, 2008 9:03 PM

It doesn't matter whether there's a center-left conspiracy to undermine the suburbs, or whatever Reihan's theory is. Energy costs are going to undermine big houses and long commutes in the long run anyway. That's true even if there's not a center-left carbon tax conspiracy to raise energy costs. Petrochemicals are simply getting more expensive, and that affects not just your gas cost, but heating, cooling, natural gas electricity generation, the deliveryman's gas cost, everything. I am not one of those peak-oil mad prophets; even very mainstream people think oil isn't ever going to come back down to the price it was a decade or so ago.

The only question, really, is whether we want to crash hard or soft when it becomes clear this style of development is no longer affordable as well as no longer sustainable.

Posted by Ben | March 14, 2008 3:22 AM