
What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create Affordable Cities? - dcgudeman
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/09/14/what-if-urban-sprawl-is-the-only-realistic-way-to-create-affordable-cities/
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sunstone
City "connectedness" is much more about time than space. So fast, affordable,
convenient transport (a la Hong Kong) can make a big city feel smaller. Cars
are the problem not the solution.

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cestith
Relax zoning so you can have more jobs near housing. Then you won't have
hundreds of acres of homogenous tract housing that requires such a long
commute.

Houston has no single major business district. It does have a serious lack of
solid transit. But if you want to live close to work, that doesn't necessarily
mean in the "downtown" area like in many cities. There are huge concentrations
of offices and stores in the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, Upper Kirby, the
Bush airport area and several suburbs/exurbs.

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epa
It seems to me like the real solution to a lot of traffic and affordable
housing problems is 'work-from-home' ideology. In the 1800s it was common for
business owners to contract with homesteads to produce good for them, which is
then picked up and sold in markets (i.e. shoes). These 'workers' were free to
find work as they chose between seasons. Of course, a very different world now
with scheduled mortgage payments and other needs, however there must be a
tipping point. The 'sharing/contractor' economy seems to be an inevitable
ideological revolution.

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acconrad
I have this theory that autonomous vehicles will enable a resurgence of the
suburb. If I can disengage from the transporting myself into being
_transported_ , I can spend that travel time working instead of navigating. If
I lived an hour away from work but I could spend 2 hours working via my car,
I'd have no problem moving to the suburbs. But as it stands right now, the
commute is the part that really freaks me out.

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heurist
It's not. I'd recommend Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American
Cities" to anyone interested in a comprehensive picture of what it takes to
make cities livable: [https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-
Cities/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-
Cities/dp/067974195X)

Also read up on all the work Singapore is doing to increase density without
ruining their economy or environment while improving livability.

And some further reading on the dynamics of city growth:
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013541)

I love thinking about this stuff, complex and fascinating :)

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krob
This is funny. Singapore is one of the most expensive places to live on the
planet. Density there, people work so many jobs just to live in the smallest
possible dwellings.

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CapitalistCartr
" . . . a website for contractors." I think that might be relevant. Not that I
expect the WSJ to challenge the status quo. Any serious analysis would have to
consider Copenhagen, Paris, Singapore, Austin at the least. And take
livability analyses seriously, too.

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vertex-four
But it doesn't matter if everyone's miserable so long as they're working 9 to
5 (or longer) - why would you think it does? /s

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sologoub
The article fails to break out cost of building versus cost of litigating to
be able to build. They mention the NIMBYs, but without putting dollar or %
value on what costs they create.

Santa Monica and West LA are great examples - costs and rents have
skyrocketed. However, much of the land is 1-2 stories, if that. Large portions
of the housing stock is more than 50 years old.

If they were to make it 3-4 stories instead (hardly Manhattan density, or even
SF), we could fit 2-3x people no problem. Unfortunately, between zoning,
NIMBYs and rent control, you can pretty much forget about it.

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castratikron
It's cheaper only because nobody pays the true cost of transportation. Make
gas $8 a gallon to cover for the damage to the environment and suddenly sprawl
won't seem so cheap.

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hx87
In that case everyone in the burbs will just buy a Leaf, Bolt, Volt or Model
S/X to bypass the cost of gasoline.

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Tiktaalik
This is why municipalities are pressing higher order governments to move to
comprehensive road pricing instead of gas taxes.

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hx87
It's a good step forward, as long as the pricing scales with the amount of
damage a car does to roads when driven. A heavy truck with skinny tires should
pay much more than a 2 door convertible with fat tires. Base it on average
recommended tire pressure, perhaps?

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squozzer
Few people outside of Manhattan picture a home as an office building with a
doorman. A few (closer to 20 now that I looked) years ago, Atlanta had a mini-
boom of hi-rise condo building. A couple of the properties did very well; they
were mostly pre-sold, though probably to speculators. Some of the others had
trouble selling all their units. Going vertical also brings a problem,
mentioned by another commentor, of "viewing" rights (i.e. no blocking the
views of established properties.) I think Trump had a similar problem with one
of his projects.

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arjunnarayan
There's an easy solution to this: remove all notion of "viewing rights". You
have no right to your view, or your lack of density, or any such NIMBY
invented property rights. This works great for Tokyo, and housing prices are
very cheap.

[http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-
housing-c...](http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-
costs-tokyo)

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jandrese
NIMBY types vote. You try telling them that someone can put up a hideous
skyscraper between their house and the mountains/ocean/etc... and they'll have
you on your ass in the street come November.

Their parents bought that house. They've lived in it all their lives. Now you
want to ruin the view and gentrify the neighborhood just because you think
single family detached homes have no business being within a mile of the city
center? Half of the legislature lives in those neighborhoods! All you are
going to do is attract undesirables anyway.

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mjevans
If viewing rights exist they should be taxed (at a premium). The valuation
should be greater than the loss of all the affected height-lines.

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arjunnarayan
Easier still to take the Coasian view. Viewing rights (by default) do not
exist. You are free to side contract with other property owners to ensure your
viewing rights by paying them.

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jandrese
That's a risky position IMHO. You create a situation where it becomes
profitable to threaten to erect a tall structure in order to extort money from
the neighbors.

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ocschwar
The main obstacle to building upwards in American cities is the illegality of
it. It's zoned, and coded and regulated to death, and can only be done in a
small portion of the land around.

Suburban sprawl, meanwhile, remains actively subsidized.

So if your high rise builders are hobbled, OF COURSE more sprawl will be the
only way to address increasing demand.

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buckbova
Downtown high-rise condos are always way more costly than the equivalent size
condo 20 miles out.

Build a bunch of three story condos out on some cheap land and you don't even
need an elevator or parking garages because there's room for covered outdoor
parking.

Build a high rise and you have all sorts of cost with putting something 20
stories high. Just the materials cost more. It also takes longer to break
ground and build.

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TulliusCicero
If the condo twenty miles out is in the middle of nowhere, it may not be any
cheaper, once you factor in the cost of building out infrastructure there and
providing public services further out. Often times these things are subsidized
though, so Americans don't realize how expensive things actually are.

A good example is when someone in a rural area is outraged when the cable
company says it'll cost a couple grand to wire up their house that's a ways
off from any main road. Like, did you think that stuff was just free?

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antisthenes
> If the condo twenty miles out is in the middle of nowhere, it may not be any
> cheaper, once you factor in the cost of building out infrastructure there
> and providing public services further out. Often times these things are
> subsidized though, so Americans don't realize how expensive things actually
> are.

That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the
losses. The infrastructure you're talking about will be built by the
city/state and the costs borne by everyone who lives up to the point of that
condo 20 miles out.

When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury
condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right now.

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TulliusCicero
> That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the
> losses.

Yes, agreed. And I'm not completely against socialization, but I see little
reason to encourage it for this case. If infrastructure and services cost more
further out, property taxes for those areas should reflect that.

> When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury
> condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right
> now.

This tends to be true because SFH-zoned areas are held as sacred cows, and
what increased density is allowed is constrained into small areas. This both
keeps land prices high, so developers need to target the high end of the
market, and it means that cheaper forms of increased density (say, building
duplexes/triplexes/granny flats in existing low-density areas) are literally
illegal.

I swear, people want developers to build huge towers and then offer up the
units for cheap. Do you think it's cheap to build those towers? Hint: it is
not. Brand new, inherently-expensive-to-build housing is always going to be
expensive to rent. The solution is to a) permit cheaper forms of housing where
possible, b) allowed increased density across a wide swathe of residential
area (which can be done the same way as (a), really), and c) accept that new
things always cost more than old things. The luxury units of today are the
upper-middle class units of twenty years from now, the middle-class units of
forty years from now, the working-units of sixty years from now, etc.

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vonnik
This article and the study it cites miss the point.

Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone
else as cheaply as possible. They are markets for jobs, goods and services.
When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when
they sprawl, they have effectively failed. In a sense, they are not really
cities, but just agglomerations of many towns without a center. This describes
many so-called cities in America, with LA being one of the most egregious
examples.

One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been
entrusted to, well, developers. Those are the contractors that Buildzoom
addresses as its audience, and the website is flattering their sensibilities.
They like a supply chain that involves suburbs with lots of cookie-cutter
mini-mansions. Easy to commodify and sell, and someone else can worry about
the commuting headaches.

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TulliusCicero
Cities have sprawled because of zoning regulations and poor transportation
policies that force them to, because they can't build up, so they have to
build out instead. You could easily get the reverse effect with an urban
growth boundary and relaxed zoning.

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oconnore
At some point you likely also need eminent domain (with a fair-ish system for
compensating people whom it affects). Somehow we are really good at eminent
domain for building highways, but not skyscrapers or trains.

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TulliusCicero
I don't think you really need eminent domain for skyscrapers. Economics +
property taxes generally provide sufficient incentive.

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astrodust
This article is a load of garbage. It's not a dichotomy between towers and
sprawl. There are cities that strike a balance between these, with mid-ride
and high-rise depending on the neighborhood and the intended use of the
properties.

You can have human-scale development, buildings 5-7 stories tall, moderate
density that promotes local commerce, safe environments for children and other
vulnerable groups, easy access to amenities, and much more.

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niftich
Can you provide an example city built in this style somewhere in the US, to
help me evaluate its success?

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jdavis703
Washington, DC. It has one of the most dense downtowns in the U.S. and has no
towers or skyscrapers (outside of NW though is relatively empty, and the
massive commuter population makes the overall numbers smaller).

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Chathamization
> outside of NW though is relatively empty

NW is the largest quadrant, but I'd hardly call the other quadrants
"relatively empty." There are active neighborhoods and lots of development all
across the city.

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jdavis703
You're right, but they're nowhere near as dense. We're talking single family,
row homes and garden-style apartments.

