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New Urbanism: Condensing the American Dream

By Peter Calthorpe
Congress for a New Urbanism

A well-organized and well-funded campaign is underway to harm the American quality of life. Americans in general agree that urban sprawl is a problem. But a collection of sprawl apologists is doing everything it can to convince people that sprawl is not just harmless, but good.

The apologists' arguments often make sense at first blush. They say sprawl is the American Dream, and that any problems with it are easy to fix. There's plenty of land left in America, they say, and congestion would go away if we would just build more roads. Most of all, they claim that sprawling development patterns are the result of the free market responding to people's true desires.

If only things were so simple.

Sprawl matters. In February, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism polled Americans from coast to coast, asking what national, state and local issues mattered most to them. Among local issues, urban sprawl was the most important issue in the country, especially in Northern California and Colorado.

This distress with urban sprawl arises from a range of factors, from loss of open space and teenage alienation to traffic congestion and economic segregation - from a lack of affordable housing to a lost sense of community.

Americans are driving more miles every year and spending more time in congestion, leading to a declining quality of life. According to Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, the longer people spend in traffic, the less likely they are to be involved in their community and family. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that sprawling suburbs, in which it is difficult to walk or bicycle from place to place, are a cause of much of the nation's epidemic of obesity.

Atlanta is the ultimate case study of these problems. In this fast-growing city of endless sprawl, people drive more miles per capita than any other city in the U.S. They also spend the most hours in traffic. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently polled local residents and found that almost half didn't know anyone on their street.

Land, Land Everywhere…

The sprawl advocates point out that land in America is plentiful. Urban development only represent 5 percent of our country. Even if we were to preserve environmentally sensitive areas, there would be more than enough space for us to sprawl as we like.

But the reality is that more than 50 percent of our population is crowding into the coasts, on just 17 percent of the country's land mass. Knowing there is lots of land in Nevada doesn't relieve most citizens. They wonder, "Do we want to lose the open space and farmland in our region?" They have answered at the polls. In the past four years, there have been hundreds of ballot initiatives across the country to preserve open space. More than 80 percent have passed.

Conserving land does not have to be draconian. A recent regional plan for the Salt Lake City area showed that by responding to the existing market demand for rental housing, redeveloping underutilized areas and reducing the average single-family lot size by less than 10 percent, the total land area needed to accommodate the next one million people would drop from 420 square miles to 167. This doesn't require that everyone move into apartment towers, and it doesn't take social engineering. It is a combination of simple land conservation and free-market economics, providing smaller lots for those who want them.

Don't Mess with the Market

Supporters of sprawl contend that everyone wants a detached home in the suburbs and that any form of growth management will frustrate this "natural" market. But the claim that people have voted with their dollars for sprawl is simplistic. In fact, the reverse is often true.

Today, many local government regulations constrain the market. For example, many communities try to maintain high property values by allowing only large-lot homes to be built. This effectively excludes many types of households, including singles, single parents, some empty nesters and the elderly - along with lower-income people.

Property rights advocates rarely decry constraints on this segment of the market. Somehow, social engineering that rewards middle-class families with kids, while punishing all others, is acceptable in their eyes.

In a free market, it would be possible to build housing options for everyone. The favored middle class family with kids represents, today, only 25 percent of new-home buyers.

One size no longer fits all. The 1990 census showed that only 11 percent of U.S. households are families with children and one wage earner. Some of the other 89 percent may want single-family homes, but many may want more housing choices than current zoning allows. To provide the full range of housing choices, we need to reduce government interference in the market. The inertia of our zoning regulations and banking policies constrains the options we have. The range of choices offered by the market has yet to catch up with economic and demographic changes.

Where choices are available - bungalows in walkable villages, town homes in real towns, lofts in vital urban neighborhoods or affordable housing just about anywhere - the housing market responds enthusiastically. If more towns would allow the development of compact communities that offer urban amenities and street life, we might find that the market actually supports more density and housing diversity, not less.

People fundamentally like small towns more than sprawl, and in many cases are moving back to older urban neighborhoods and even central cities. And they can't get enough of New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a style of development that arose in the early 1990s. It creates compact, walkable neighborhoods where people can live, work, play and learn. Where towns allow New Urbanism to be built, it sells faster and for a premium, compared to nearby conventional suburbs.

Recent studies by Market Perspectives and the Urban Land Institute that compared New Urbanist developments with standard subdivisions showed a minimum 15 percent premium for houses in New Urbanist communities. The projects were also selling faster than those in conventional subdivisions.

What if real mixed-use towns were available to live in or near? A study by American Lives showed that a "walkable town center" is second only to "open space" in new home buyer's desires. The market is changing but some marketing experts, constantly looking into their rear-view mirrors, don't recognize it.

Traffic: Are roads the answer?

The apologists for sprawl contend that we could solve the traffic congestion problem by building more roads. But increasing numbers of people oppose this strategy, recognizing that it would only be a temporary fix. More roads lead inevitably to more auto-oriented development, which consumes more open space and leads to more congestion. A University of California, Berkeley, study showed that for every 10 percent increase in new freeway miles, a 9 percent increase in traffic would be generated within five years.

More importantly, we can no longer afford to keep building new freeways. It has been estimated that California needs to add approximately 720 new lane miles per year to keep up with its growing auto demands. The maximum ever built was 573 miles in 1967; current budgets only allow about 50 lane miles a year.

Roads are only one part of the cost. The Salt Lake study compared low-density development with more roads to a compact, transit-oriented regional future and found the former cost the new home buyer an average of $30,000 more for backbone infrastructure and services. The wealthy may be happy to pay these costs, but many may be priced out of living in the Salt Lake area if such a sprawl future materializes.

Why not let the users pay? Build toll lanes on existing highways, say the land-use libertarians (and, ironically, the Environmental Defense Fund). But this approach creates a very exclusive future; the next ring of sprawl will be accessible to the wealthy, who can speed down economically segregated highways while the working poor and young families without disposable income poke along in the slow lanes. Congestion solved for some, fewer choices for others.

The apologists for sprawl criticize transit as a solution to congestion. They argue that even doubling transit ridership (for example, from 2.5 percent of trips to 5 percent) is slight compensation for increased density. They're right: Transit alone will not solve the congestion problem. What they overlook is there are a range of alternatives that are interdependent with transit. In most of Europe, walking and biking are much more significant alternatives to auto use than transit. In Sweden, with a cold, wet climate, more than 50 percent of trips are made on foot or bike, with just 10 percent by transit and 37 percent by car. Increased transit use has a multiplier effect on walking, and vice versa.

Walking to the solution

The key is building more walkable environments, which not only reduce the necessity of using cars for local trips but also support the use of transit for longer trips. Walkable neighborhoods coupled with good transit can have a large effect on Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). In Portland, for example, there is a three-to-one variation in VMT per capita between its auto-oriented suburbs and walkable urban neighborhoods. In the Bay Area, it ranges from 8,000 VMT per household in San Francisco to 32,000 in Contra Costa County.

The real goal, of course, is improving people's mobility and access, not just reducing auto congestion. And this depends more on promoting different land-use patterns than building new roads. Pedestrian-oriented, mixed land-use patterns coupled with a range of transit alternatives (trains, buses, jitneys, car pools, etc.) can provide much-needed choices in environments now completely monopolized by cars. Simply put, locating everyday destinations closer to home or closer together may be a better strategy than building bigger roads to connect increasingly distant places.

The Cost of Containment

The land-use reactionaries claim that regional open space preservation and urban growth boundaries (UGB) drive up home prices by limiting the supply of developable land. They claim that Portland's UGB has driven up home prices dramatically.

But the link between rising prices and the UGB is unclear. Portland's median home price is now $150,000, which is about average for major Western cities. And the doubling of housing costs that Portland experienced in the '90s was matched in Salt Lake and Denver - both regions without UGBs. Some would argue that the home price escalation in Portland is tied more to the region's phenomenal job growth than to a shortage of land.

Perhaps Portland's high-quality jobs, open space, walkable neighborhoods, convenient transit and successful downtown are making the region more desirable and, therefore, more expensive. Should we have a policy to ensure that a region maintains a low quality of life so home values do not rise? Isn't it a free market choice to pay a higher price for a single-family home in a region that provides a higher quality of life?

Property Rights - and Responsibilities

Finally, property rights advocates argue against regional planning, or any planning for that matter. They say that people should have the right to develop their property as they please.

But what if one person's development decision adversely impacts another's property, or the neighborhood? What if certain choices require more public tax dollars (to pay for the infrastructure and services, for example) than others?

At the regional scale, it is public dollars that enable development on private property. Without highways, roads, sewers, water systems and public services, development is not viable. It is conservative and defensible to seek out and implement the most cost-effective set of public investments to support growth. This is the basis of the Smart Growth legislation in Maryland, which will not pay for development in areas where investments for infrastructure and services is deemed inefficient.

Study after study finds that sprawl is more expensive to build and maintain than more compact walkable neighborhoods. Certainly, we all have property rights, but not the right to use public dollars to enhance our development potential or the right to degrade the environment for others.

Expanding the Horizon

The apologists for sprawl always seem to resort to oversimplifications to make their case: "Developed land in America only represents 5 percent of the country - there's plenty of room," "The alternative to sprawl is high-rise living," "Cars are flexible and transit is not" or "Sprawl is the people's choice or it wouldn't exist."

Comments like these sidestep the challenge of finding new patterns of development that expand people's choices. What if we could conserve accessible open space and provide a full range of housing options? What if we could expand the flexibility of the car by adding the flexibility to walk, bike or use transit? What if we could define a new metropolitan form, one that was not black or white, car or train, high-density or low-, suburban or urban? What if we could move beyond rhetorical extremes and set to work designing complex, multifaceted communities that fit the post-industrial society we are becoming?

New Urbanism assumes that the future is not necessarily a linear extension of the past, that yesterday's market is not necessarily tomorrow's. The American Dream is changing. The issue is not density but design - the quality of place, its scale, mix and connections. The alternative to sprawl is not a forced march back to tenements but a range of unique places with various densities and in various locations - more choices for a diverse society.

Peter Calthorpe is principal of Calthorpe Associates, which includes urban designers, planners and architects, in Berkeley, California. He is a founder of the Congress for a New Urbanism.

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Sprawl: You love it, but dare not speak its name

By Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson
University of Southern California

Attempts to control sprawl have two problems.

First, they try to reverse strong market-driven spatial forces. The results of these forces include declining densities (except in areas with very high land prices or large immigrant populations), continuing suburbanization and exurbanization of both jobs and people, decreasing numbers of jobs in the central business district, falling public transit ridership combined with stable personal travel times and increasing suburbanization by modest-income households.

Second, and somewhat related, they ignore powerful consumer preferences for a single-family suburban home, a private backyard, high levels of mobility achieved via driving and inexpensive shopping at suburban malls and "Big Box" retailers (e.g., Wal-Mart, Target).

Although ecological concerns and environmental quality certainly merit substantial attention, the debate needs to be focused on the improvement of human welfare. But the agenda continues to be driven by an overwhelmingly white, higher-income elitist class which puts insects before people, trees before jobs and green fields before affordable housing.

To further this agenda, the villains are easy to identify: greedy developers who voraciously gobble up agricultural land, alienated suburbanites who gave us the Columbine High School shootings, the country's most obese population living in Atlanta's vast spaces, executives at the oil corporations and the middle class for deserting the central cities like rats from a sinking ship.

Yet consider the following facts. The activities of 164,000 residential construction firms, most of them very small, have created the highest home ownership rate (68 percent of all households) in American history and have built us the homes we like to live in. Central city crime rates (and gun infringements in schools) are approximately 10 times higher than in the suburbs. To suggest that sprawl (by discouraging walking) contributes more to obesity than a poor diet is ludicrous to anyone with even a basic knowledge of calorie counting. Automobility is a massive contributor to personal welfare, and fears of air pollution, resource depletion and global warming recede year by year as technological progress improves fuel economy and reduces emissions per vehicle (although higher taxes on SUVs and trucks have some merit to influence consumer decisions).

Yes, most central cities are like sinking ships, but the explanation is not selfish suburbanites but failing public schools, high crime rates, heavy taxes, impoverished public treasuries and decaying infrastructure. As Anthony Downs has demonstrated convincingly, there is no evidence to support the common argument that suburbanization itself is at the root of these core city problems.

Yet the anti-sprawl protagonists have proposed a raft of policy initiatives of dubious merit. Among them is their support for New Urbanism, whereby architects promote high-density living and design improvements in housing, landscape and streets to promote "communitarianism" and non-motorized travel, but typically end up building high-income communities on peripheral greenfield sites.

Almost a cult, with its own gurus, New Urbanism suggests that by changing architectural styles, street layout and physical neighborhood characteristics, we can somehow change human behavior. David Harvey, the well-known geographer, got it right: "Spatial Determinism." For those of you who remember "The City of Joy," either the book or the movie, it embodied the key idea that squeezing people close together, like in Calcutta, somehow makes them better human beings. We doubt that the owners of the $600,000 houses in Seaside, Florida (you saw the houses in the movie "The Truman Show"), appreciate the analogy. We can solve all societal problems by changing the built environment: This is the conceit of New Urbanist architects. Talk about big oil: These are fat cats selling snake oil (but self-righteously) and reaping huge consultancy fees for projects, many of which will never be built.

In addition, the anti-sprawl groups promote Urban Growth Boundaries to mitigate the invasion of agricultural land, at the expense of escalating land prices and diminished housing affordability. This explains why Portland, Oregon, was the country's leader in house price escalation in the 1990s. They have supported the huge public transit subsidies ($385 billion since the 1960s) that nevertheless manage to diminish transit ridership by diverting funds from potentially high-volume buses to low-volume rail (as measured by person-trips per dollar spent). They praise the concept of Transport-Oriented Developments (TODs) that are so difficult to implement (except, maybe, on greenfield sites) and do little to discourage automobile use because of their primary appeal to existing transit users.

They have not objected to public subsidies for sports stadia, convention centers, government buildings and other large-scale downtown projects that will never recoup their upfront costs via tax revenues. There are too many convention centers to share the business, while retail sales and services around sports stadia at best merely divert consumer dollars from elsewhere in the metropolitan region rather than generate new spending. They have co-opted developers, environmentalists, planning commissions and everyone else to the buzz phrase banner of Smart Growth (who could be in favor of Stupid Growth?) that means all things to all people.

They have argued for immigration controls, on the specious argument that population growth -- not housing density -- is the prime source of sprawl. (The fact is that immigration, especially from Latin America and to a lesser extent from Asia, increases persons per dwelling but not dwellings per acre.) They have sponsored farmland preservation ordinances in a country that has consistently produced too much agricultural output. Since 1930, the acreage of land under cultivation has declined while agricultural production has soared, the result of massive increases in productivity. They propose infill development as a panacea, despite a scarcity of sites, the huge costs of restoring "brownfields," the infringement on scarce open public spaces and strong central-city "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) opposition to higher densities.

They point to European and East Asian cities as their paradigms of ideal development, ignoring the fact that automobile use in these utopias is rising much faster than in the United States.

It is all very strange. The wholesale abandonment of central planning and social engineering at the global level has been accompanied in the land of the free by its reverse at the local level -- more regulation, more top-down decrees (local governments call them ordinances) and more interference with the lifestyles and freedoms of American families.

On a related issue, we should recognize that governments are poor stewards of scarce resources. Wildfires on federal lands in the U.S. and serious ground and water pollution in Eastern Europe are two obvious examples. Assets that are privately owned are protected the best. Private eco-parks in Africa are much more successful in preserving rare species than poorly-patrolled national preserves.

The message is that markets work; more specifically, let us free up the land markets that have been over-regulated for decades. Let us marry the preferences of individuals with the market forces that help to satisfy them. This is not to support markets without constraints; for example, we can direct development to areas where environmental damage would be minimal. Planners would be much more effective if they focused on carrying out a very limited number of tasks, but doing them well. They also should subscribe to the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.

Some areas of the United States, such as California, are going to increase their populations substantially in the next decades (unless the immigration tap is turned off), and if they were all accommodated at high densities, it might make a difference. But that is not going to happen. The American home ownership dream is too entrenched. And if you are going to buy, you prefer (if you can afford it) your own little castle, not joint ownership of a condominium or townhouse development (although you may see advantages in the security of your little castle within a private gated community).

Americans, when surveyed (and, more often than not, when voting; how else can you explain the success of more than 70 percent of about 250 local growth management initiatives in the 1998 elections?), come out strongly in favor of higher densities, but not for them and not in their neighborhood. There is nothing that brings residents out in droves to a city council or planning commission meeting like a proposed high-density project nearby, primarily because of their fears about increased traffic. NIMBY reigns!

In a country where you can drive for a hundred miles without passing a gas station, the idea that urban development will lead to a scarcity of land is absurd. Having two or three cars is not considered an indulgence, and is less of an environmental threat as emission technologies improve. Having a nice house, with individual bedrooms, a yard for the children and a home office, is a universal goal. Of course, there are some social engineers and environmental activists who would like to tell us what to do and how to behave. But their actions fly in the face of the strong American traditions of individualism and freedom of choice.

This is not to suggest that there will be no change. The Smart Growth movement is gaining some momentum (after all, Vice President Gore is its chief cheerleader), and it may eventually permeate the public consciousness. Although the soccer moms live sprawl, they dare not admit it. So, at some time in the near future, environmentalists and developers may make their pact with the devil, but for different reasons: smugness and higher profits.

Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson are professors in both the Department of Economics and the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California.

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