fling93 loves fishies

The Levittown style of home buildeing had a huge amount to do with this. Levit moved the price of building a house way down. I am not sure his building style would have worked in something other then a suburban setting.

Have you ever lived in the suburbs?

“Surban Nation” is a political as any book could be. The criticisms of New Urbanism are neither minor nor infrequent. The crime, socioimpacts and health issues the NURBs wish to hang on our evolving exurban nation have been uniformly debunked. But all that pales in comparison to your observation about the libertarian nature of NURB. Smart Growth and all it’s different faces are absolutely dependent on municipal intervention in the development process. The antithesis of libertarian. Likewise your cavalier dismissal of the economic isolationism practiced by NURB. It is more expensive BECAUSE it is less efficient not more desireable. Even Duany, the co-author has explicitly admitted this.

Robert Coté: “Surban Nation” is a political as any book could be.

Well, I found it a lot less political than, say Fast Food Nation, which so far seems unabashedly liberal and surprisingly devotes a lot more verbiage to the whole “GM destroying streetcars” issue.

Robert Coté: Smart Growth and all it’s different faces are absolutely dependent on municipal intervention in the development process. The antithesis of libertarian.

Yes, I acknowledged that, but pointed out that mixed-use zoning moves us in a direction of less municipal intervention than we have now. I would imagine you would find the Chris Fiscelli piece of interest.

your cavalier dismissal of the economic isolationism practiced by NURB

I don’t understand the issue. Suburban Nation does discuss how suburbia has stratified people along socio-economic lines, sometimes absurdly dividing up the middle class (e.g. communities of $100,000 houses, $200,000 houses, and $350,000 houses). So they do advocate mixed-income housing as well. It’s not a discussion I think libertarians would find compelling, and I didn’t think I could do the full issue justice with a single paragraph in a blog post. But refer to Chapter 3 of the book (specifically pages 43-49) to see what I’m talking about.

It is more expensive BECAUSE it is less efficient not more desireable. Even Duany, the co-author has explicitly admitted this.

Can you elaborate or point me to a source? This doesn’t make economic sense to me, and either way, it would also imply that gated communities are even less efficient.

The criticisms of New Urbanism are neither minor nor infrequent. The crime, socioimpacts and health issues the NURBs wish to hang on our evolving exurban nation have been uniformly debunked.

I addressed all the concerns that I was able to find on the web. If you have sources to recommend, I would be willing to read them.

Personally, I find it very un-libertarian to support taxpayer money paying for roads and freeways. The libertarian belief is that if there is a market demand for roads, they will get built (most likely by the car, oil, and tire companies, which have a vested interest in their product being competitive — of course, they found it more cost-effective to lobby for taxpayer subsidies instead).

I disagree with you that “suburbia” will always be around. That type of lifestyle requires unbelievable amounts of energy. And I’m not just talking about the gas your car requires. Everthing from heating and cooling your home (which tends to be much larger then a typical urban home) to mowing your lawn to the purchases you make where you shop (transportation costs account for up to 25% of the costs of goods sold). All of this is possible (not very responsible though) when oil prices are in the $40 to $60 per barell range. What happens when they rise to $75 or even $100 per barell? Look at it this way, suburbia (as we know it) is a strictly American phenomenon. Other countries come close, but no other country in the world lives such an energy hungry lifestyle as we do. Surburbia is also a recent development. Humans have lived in compact settlements for thousands of years. Only in the last 60 have we moved to the burbs (en masse). I truly believe that the day will come when students of history will look back on this period in time as an anomoly. A brief event in the history of human settlement that was socially and environmentally irresponsible, and ultimately unsustainable.

Ryan: I disagree with you that “suburbia” will always be around. That type of lifestyle requires unbelievable amounts of energy. … I truly believe that the day will come when students of history will look back on this period in time as an anomoly.

While I wouldn’t miss suburbia and hope that you are right, I think consumers will continue to choose it as long as the societal and environmental costs aren’t passed on to them. And at this point, there would be a tremendous amount of political pressure not to do that, so I think the tragedy of the commons will persist here.

Although, one thing that would accomplish this would be, as you mentioned:

What happens when they rise to $75 or even $100 per barrel?

Well, I’m not sure that is a given anytime soon. The current high prices might be a temporary blip due to the insecurity in Iraq and problems at Russia’s YUKOS. I’m just starting to read about peak oil theory, so I’m not really sure what to think of it yet. Some of it makes sense, but the fact that people have been doomsaying the same thing for decades makes me wonder.

But that risk (among other risks) is certainly one reason to support development models that reduce our country’s dependence on automobiles.

rich: The Levittown style of home building had a huge amount to do with this.

The book doesn’t discuss Levitt much, arguing more that the FHA and VA programs created a huge demand that Levitt merely helped meet. But perhaps it was actually more a combination of both factors, since the lower costs made buying cheaper than renting for many folks.

rich: Have you ever lived in the suburbs?

Yes, my entire childhood. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but I can see a lot of the points that the book made.

Robert Coté: “Surban Nation” is a political as any book could be.

fish93: Well, I found it a lot less political than, say Fast Food Nation, which so far seems unabashedly liberal

RC2: “Suburban Nation” is political in that it exhorts massive government intervention in a process that has until now managed to provide extremely positive results for both participants and society. The rationale for this intervention seems to be some vague dissatisfaction on the part of the elite with a social form that doesn’t conform to their preferred outcomes. Only SmUGLERS (smart urban growth lovers) and planners are unhappy with the
current process. Everyone else is content to let evolutionary land use
policies develop. SmUGLERs like all malcontents claim the need to change
the status quo. Planners are merely pursuing their life goals of shaping
the developed environment to their will. Recent trends in land use
regulation, notably Napa and Ventura Counties in California represent the
greatest threats to the NewUrb/NeoTrad/SmUG fad du jour of the
“professional” planning community. Surely Napa and Ventura are effectively
promoting the claimed goals of those planner driven marketing progroms but
their failing is in their inability to promote the agenda planners assumed
would follow from such programs. It should be noted that every single
planner at the city and county level publicly opposed the passage of Ventura
Counties’ SOAR initiative.

Dense transit oriented urban conclaves surrounded by distinct rural
character, in other words, nodalism on a regional basis is unnatural for our
current circumstances.

fish93: …and surprisingly devotes a lot more verbiage to the whole “GM destroying streetcars” issue.

RC2: Urban myth. The places NCL interceded retained streetcar service longer than those places it wasn’t investing.

Robert Coté: Smart Growth and all it’s different faces are absolutely dependent on municipal intervention in the development process. The antithesis of libertarian.

fish93: Yes, I acknowledged that, but pointed out that mixed-use zoning moves us in a direction of less municipal intervention than we have now. I would imagine you would find the Chris Fiscelli piece of interest.

I saw the Fiscelli papers when they were published. Mixed-use is code for ten pounds of manure in a five pound sack. That’s unfair to manure. 5 lbs in a 5 lb sack can comand a high price at the garden shop but 10 lbs is nothing but a mess. Or how about this; “This is such a beautiful neighborhood let’s build a factory here.”

So for mixed use you need to design and build fully walkable, and fully transit served and
fully functional uncongested road urban patterns built to be both consumer
attractive and competitively priced. Oh and do that at densities and with
land use mixes that do not negatively impact municipal finances or any
infrastructure ranging from schools to sewers. For a recent example of a
mixed use public private partnership urban walkable downtown oriented
community enhancing brownfield blighted redevelopment success story I
suggest the Los Angeles School Districts’ Belmont High School project. The
LAUSD only exists in its’ current form so that the LAMTA has competition as
the worst public agency in the nation.

Why is is so hard to believe that accomodating autos AND walking AND transit
while increasing density AND municipal costs is going raise prices and
involve tradeoffs? NURB is more expensive and sub-optimal and exclusionary
and generally uncompetitive. Don’t believe me, read the following Duany
quote.

“There are people who love suburban sprawl,” Duany explains. Suburbia does,
after all, provide a standard of living unavailable in cities except to the
wealthy.

Of all the high profile NURBists there has been a split.
Some like Calthorpe and Duany are beginning to see the problems I’ve always
seen. Others like Anthony Downs have actually come over to my side after
performing real analysis on real data. Then there is the third camp, the
irrational zealots as the only ones left in the original NURB camp.

Robert Coté: your cavalier dismissal of the economic isolationism practiced by NURB

fish93: I don’t understand the issue. Suburban Nation does discuss how suburbia has stratified people along socio-economic lines, sometimes absurdly dividing up the middle class (e.g. communities of $100,000 houses, $200,000 houses, and $350,000 houses). So they do advocate mixed-income housing as well. It’s not a discussion I think libertarians would find compelling, and I didn’t think I could do the full issue justice with a single paragraph in a blog post. But refer to Chapter 3 of the book (specifically pages 43-49) to see what I’m talking about.

RC2: The suburbs have done more to spread the benefits to the lower economic strata than anything the NURBs can dream up. Their ideas of mixing housing cannot work. There is owner value (perceived and actual) along with municipal efficiency in keeping the current stratification.

Robert Coté: It is more expensive BECAUSE it is less efficient not more desireable. Even Duany, the co-author has explicitly admitted this.

fish93: Can you elaborate or point me to a source?

RC2:

“To make it affordable, you have to make it less
pleasant,” Duany says.

This a blatant out of context quote from:

http://sciam.com/2000/0300issue/0300profile.html

Which, unfortunately, is no longer available online.

The full context paragraph says:

One criticism is not so easily dismissed. The very popularity of
New Urbanist developments drives up their prices and undercuts
one of Duany’s stated goals: diversity. The cheapest house now on
sale in Seaside is a 1,000-square-foot cottage for $510,000. His
own staffers told me they cannot afford to live in the places
they design. It is an issue that Duany says he still struggles
with. Underdesigning homes—making the closets smaller,
say—holds down their value. “To make it affordable, you have to
make it less pleasant,” Duany says. The absolute price level,
however, is set by scarcity.

You can see why I both dismiss but need to mention the full paragraph.
Even you have got to admit there’s a whole lot of rationalization
going into the excuse that popularity and supply/demand are the only
reasons NURB is expensive. We can talk more, feel free to point out
the usual logical fallacies and characterizations of of differing
opinions as personal failings on my part but hopefully the quote and
the body of pricing evidence for NURBs should be sufficient to lay
this specific claim to rest.

fish93: This doesn’t make economic sense to me, and either way, it would also imply that gated communities are even less efficient.

RC2: No, NURB is expensive AND unsustainable. Gated communities are extremely self supporting.

Robert Coté: The criticisms of New Urbanism are neither minor nor infrequent. The crime, socioimpacts and health issues the NURBs wish to hang on our evolving exurban nation have been uniformly debunked.

fish93: I addressed all the concerns that I was able to find on the web. If you have sources to recommend, I would be willing to read them.

RC2: The easiest recommendation would be to join the yahoo group preservingtheamericandream.

fish93: Personally, I find it very un-libertarian to support taxpayer money paying for roads and freeways.

RC2: I agree. Luckily those taxpayer funded roads are extremely rare. It’s a common misperception that because our roads are administered by government that they are taxpayer supported.

fish93: The libertarian belief is that if there is a market demand for roads, they will get built (most likely by the car, oil, and tire companies, which have a vested interest in their product being competitive — of course, they found it more cost-effective to lobby for taxpayer subsidies instead).

RC2: That libertarian view prevailed for 50 years but recently has been perverted by politics. Transit supporters have managed to divert so much of the dedicated funding stream that the roads are suffering. Now well meaning redistributionists want to do to the built environment what they’ve managed to do to to transportation.

If it’s okay with you, I can go ahead and fix the formatting in your comment. In the future, I would recommend using the “Preview” button before you post.

From what I could find out, the big problem with Belmont was that it was sitting on an old oil field spewing toxic gases. What does that have to do with mixed-use?

Robert Coté: Why is is so hard to believe that accomodating autos AND walking AND transit while increasing density AND municipal costs is going raise prices and involve tradeoffs? NURB is more expensive and sub-optimal and exclusionary and generally uncompetitive.

I would think you get better results from making the attempt and providing people a wider variety of choices (and thus, more freedom) than suburbia’s solution of accomodating the automobile by forcing as many people to use it as possible to increase traffic and not attempting to accomodate walking at all.

One criticism is not so easily dismissed. The very popularity of New Urbanist developments drives up their prices and undercuts one of Duany’s stated goals: diversity. The cheapest house now on sale in Seaside is a 1,000-square-foot cottage for $510,000. His own staffers told me they cannot afford to live in the places they design. It is an issue that Duany says he still struggles with. Underdesigning homes—making the closets smaller, say—holds down their value. “To make it affordable, you have to make it less pleasant,” Duany says. The absolute price level, however, is set by scarcity.

Indeed, that was the exact paragraph I had in mind when I said, “This is actually an obvious sign that New Urbanism is onto something, because it indicates that the demand far outstrips the supply.”

RC: It is more expensive BECAUSE it is less efficient not more desireable. Even Duany, the co-author has explicitly admitted this.

Prices in a free market are driven by supply and demand. Efficiency has nothing to do with it. Buyers don’t care what your costs are. They won’t pay more for a good than the value that they believe they will get from it. It’s all about supply and demand. The higher the demand and/or the lower the supply, the higher the price. The lower the demand and/or the higher the supply, the lower the price. It is impossible for buyers to be driving up the price of a good that is not desirable. If buyers don’t like a good, the demand falls, and the price drops. And real estate prices are driven a lot more by location than quality of construction (drive by some of the million dollar clunkers in Palo Alto sometime).

The problem is that, as described in pages 43-49, the authors believe that there are a lot of social benefits to having socio-economic diversity within a community. Of course, this is not a problem if you like socio-economic stratification, which seems to be indicated when you said, “There is owner value (perceived and actual) along with municipal efficiency in keeping the current stratification.” If you like stratification, then the priciness of NURB is a good thing, because then the elitist rich people will move to the NURB communities, leaving fewer rich people in the suburbs, and thus the “American Dream” it will become more affordable, spreading even more benefits to the lower economic strata.

But if do you think stratification is a problem, then the high price is a problem (albeit one that also already exists in suburbia), which is why Duany’s is attempting to lower prices by lowering demand by lowering quality, i.e. “To make it affordable, you have to make it less pleasant.” An increase in supply would accomplish the same thing, but it would take a much longer time. And having a more diverse set of buyers also helps broaden political backing.

Of course, if you like stratification only when it happens in suburbia and not NURB, that probably means you aren’t being objective.

No, NURB is expensive AND unsustainable. Gated communities are extremely self supporting.

Define self-supporting. Gated communities don’t grow their own food or create their own building materials, so I have absolutely no idea what you mean by this. I also don’t know what you mean by efficiency. Suburbia is neither an efficient use of land nor resources, let alone the time its inhabitants take to perform day-to-day tasks. So what exactly is it more efficient with?

fling93: Personally, I find it very un-libertarian to support taxpayer money paying for roads and freeways.

RC: I agree. Luckily those taxpayer funded roads are extremely rare. It’s a common misperception that because our roads are administered by government that they are taxpayer supported. … Transit supporters have managed to divert so much of the dedicated funding stream that the roads are suffering.

Am I mistaken, or are you talking about a funding stream made up of taxpayer dollars?

RC: “Suburban Nation” is a political as any book could be.

f93: Well, I found it a lot less political than, say “Fast Food Nation,” which so far seems unabashedly liberal

RC: “Suburban Nation” is political in that it exhorts massive government intervention in a process that has until now managed to provide extremely positive results for both participants and society.

Suburbia only exists due to massive government intervention in the process. Evolution had nothing to do with it. Government was the one who decided shops and housing could not be built in the same zones, government was the one issuing FHA and VA loans and dictating that they only apply to single-family homes, and government was the one who decided all taxpayers should pay for roads, regardless of whether they used them, or even if they owned cars. Suburbia was a giant sociological experiment conducted by the government.

Of course, if you like government sociological experiments, but only when it results in suburbia, then that probably means you aren’t being objective.

f93: …and [“Fast Food Nation”] surprisingly devotes a lot more verbiage to the whole “GM destroying streetcars” issue.

RC: Urban myth. The places NCL interceded retained streetcar service longer than those places it wasn’t investing.

I know, which is why I didn’t cite it in the post. Well, the GM destroying streetcars isn’t a myth. The myth is on the wider long-term effects (or lack thereof). But my point was that “Suburban Nation” devoted only a footnote to the affair, whereas a book that wasn’t even about sprawl devoted several pages to it.

“Suburban Nation” never blames a political party or politician, it doesn’t exhort readers to vote for a particular party, it doesn’t name names in doing a blame game, it doesn’t tell emotionally manipulative sob stories, it doesn’t distort figures by failing to adjust for inflation. That makes it pretty non-political in my judgement.

And, of course, it doesn’t quote people out of context, criticize using terminology like “manure”, or use hyperbole like “political as any book could be.”

RC: Mixed-use is code for ten pounds of manure in a five pound sack. That’s unfair to manure.

You know, sprawl is not one of my pet issues, like electoral reform, campaign finance, or free trade. I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I had no opinion on the issue until I read the book, and I didn’t bother writing this post until now despite having read it over a year ago. So I’m probably one of the most receptive and objective people you’ll ever find willing to listen to you. And given that this post was picked up by Planetizen, this was a good chance to communicate your ideas to a sizable online audience of people in the industry. But vitriol like this conveys no useful information, and indeed is a big warning sign that you have strong emotional interest in the outcome, and thus are unlikely to be a useful source of unbiased information on this matter. I’d recommend trying a little more objective rationality next time, unless your only goal is preaching to the choir.

Houston, in fact, does not have any zoning. Instead it has nuisance laws and, in some neighborhoods, deed restrictions. Deed restrictions should appeal to libertarians: private developers assemble a parcel of land and sell off the homes with restrictions built into the deeds. The city has a dept to enforce the restrictions.

IMHO, the lack of zoning has been beneficial: we’re developing lots of new high density residential, areas can renew very easily to their highest-value purpose (from old industrial to residential, for instance) and I would have to say we have one of the most robust restaurant scenes in the country (it’s real easy for a local - inc. immigrants - to set up a new place: no approvals to fight for, which favor the big chains).

As far as the smell, tell your wife she almost certainly was in Pasadena (home of Refinery Row), not Houston… ;-)

Tory: As far as the smell, tell your wife she almost certainly was in Pasadena (home of Refinery Row), not Houston… ;-)

I went to UH. And the whole area smelled. Badly. Some of it definitely came from Pasadena, but not all. Pasadena has a smell all its own, and I distinctly remember a different aroma in the air on smog days.

Of course, I’m not arguing that lack of zoning laws is to blame. San Francisco has tons of zoning laws and it also smells.

Hmmm. Houston smelled when you were there, and now San Francisco smells when you are there. Let’s see… could the common element be…

You?

Oh shoot, I’m sleeping on the couch tonight. Dammit, I shouldn’t have typed this while she’s looking over my shoulder!

Anyway, thanks for the clarification on Houston, Tory. It sounds promising. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have included the crack about Houston smelling, but hey, I love messin’ with Texas.