Urbanism and Density

Residential units in Napa, near river

With most of my recent posts, I’ve been attempting to convince people to attend upcoming free public meetings, hosted by the Urban Community Partnership, at which StrongTowns and Urban3 will talk about financially sustainable cities.  The meetings will start on Tuesday evening, January 19, in Santa Rosa.  With the meetings nearly upon us, I probably can’t do much more to convince folks to attend. 

But for anyone still on the fence, I’ll note that the meeting details, a link to the RSVP site, and links to most of my posts about StrongTowns can be found here.

However, the expected content of the meetings remains very much in my head.

Today, I’ll write about a topic that may be useful to those attending the meetings, an aspect of urbanism that seems to puzzle many.

About a year ago, I offered the following dual definition for “urbanism”:

(1) The study, promotion, and implementation of development concepts for settings that are significantly denser in residential, working, and commercial opportunities than rural or suburban locations.

(2) The advocacy of concepts for (1) that meet beneficial goals such as improved walkability, reduced energy consumption, stronger social networks, more stable municipal finances, or other identified positive outcomes.

It’s not a perfect definition.  As I look at it today, I see several changes that I’d still make.  But it’s a reasonable starting point.  And not once does it mention density.  Which may seem puzzling because many people try to equate urbanism and density.

Rarely does a month pass without someone saying to me “I don’t support urbanism because I don’t like density.”

It’s a statement that’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of urbanist reasoning.  It also leaves the speaker in an awkward position.  I’ll deal with the two in order.

Every urbanist probably has their own unique ranking of the beneficial goals that urbanism tries to attain.  For me, there are a big three that fall in the following order.

The first is environmental.  Even more than municipal finances, slowing the progress of climate change seems the defining challenge of our time.  With energy use being the primary cause of climate change and with over half of all energy going toward transportation and buildings, those are two seem the prime targets for conservation, conservation that can be accomplished by more shared walls, smaller homes with the community serving as a shared living room, and more opportunity to live daily on foot or on bicycle, all of which are accomplished by density.

So my first goal of urbanism isn’t density, it’s energy conservation.  But it turns out that density is the best route to that goal.

My next goal is sustainable municipal finance, particularly on the infrastructure maintenance issue.  And the key factor in raising sufficient property tax revenue to maintain infrastructure is the ratio of assessed value to infrastructure.  Put more residents on the same length of street, water main, sewer, and storm drain and that ratio is improved, so density is once again a key factor.

So my second goal of urbanism isn’t density, it’s better municipal finances.  But it turns out again that density is a good route to that goal.

My third goal is social.  I find it satisfying to walk out my front door knowing that groceries are a half block to my right, that the screw needed to repair a broken railing is a block to my left, and that my dentist and accountant can be reached by a bus that stops right in front of me.  I find it a more satisfying to live my days encountering other people by brushing shoulders against them rather than viewing each other through windshields.

But the only way for the businesses to survive in walkable settings is for enough folks to live within walkable range to sustain them.

So my third and final goal of urbanism isn’t density, it’s a social setting that feels right to me.  And it turns out yet again that density is a good route to that goal.

The pattern should be obvious.  Urbanism isn’t density.  Urbanism is other laudable goals and density just happens to be the consistent path to those goals.

Being against urbanism because one doesn’t like density is like being against financial planning because one doesn’t like saving.  Saving is only a path to the real goals of financial planning, such as home purchase, college expenses, and secure retirement.  And density is only a path to the real goals of slowing climate change, improving municipal finances, and making better social settings.

And that gets us to the awkwardness of arguing urbanism using the density argument.  It leaves the speaker in the position of arguing against combating climate change, sustainable municipal finances, and stronger social connections.  Sure, one can argue for mandatory conversion to electrical vehicles, higher property tax rates, and more parks, but those are three tough and probably unwinnable arguments to make.

It’s easier to become an urbanist and to look for ways to make density more palatable.

Next time, I’ll return to a topic I’d hoped to cover before the New Year, a plan that was derailed when the StrongTowns visit claimed my attention.  I’ll write about the urbanist organizations that get my support and might be worthy of yours.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Urbanism and Senior Living: The Cases For and Against Mobile Home Parks

For several years, I was on the board of a local Rebuilding Together affiliate, a non-profit organization that provides free home repairs for low-income homeowners.  Like most affiliates, our biggest event of the year was an April workday when several hundred local citizens volunteered a day of labor.

One year, a project captain invited a group of volunteers to her home for post-workday beverages.  I found myself in her kitchen, sipping a beer and chatting with a city councilmember who had worked on a project.

I assume the councilmember had worked on a mobile home because the discussion quickly turned to the role of mobile homes in our city.  His view was that mobile homes were a temporary aberration and that the long-term goal of the city should be to replace them with stick-built homes.  His principal argument was the longer life of well-maintained stick-built construction, although he also noted the horizontal spread of single-story mobile homes and the opportunity for more compact living with stick-built residences.

With that memory in mind, it was interesting to read the suggestion by Lisa Margonelli in Pacific Standard that mobile home parks might have an essential role in the housing future of all of us, particularly seniors.  She looks in depth at the Pismo Dunes mobile home park, near Pismo Beach, California.

Margonelli’s argument is that mobile home parks provide a low-cost alternative to other options, while also fostering a relationship between seniors, a supportive network that others have called a “naturally-occurring retirement community”.

I’ll use the dichotomy between the councilmember’s comments and Margonelli’s article as a starting point from which to write about the possible role of mobile home parks as senior communities and to conclude a series of posts I’ve written about urbanism and senior living.  I won’t forget urbanism and seniors and will find opportunities to add more insights on the subject, but will begin focusing elsewhere in my next post.

Margonelli makes a reasonable case for mobile homes, but I’ll add another point.  Mobile home parks encourage alternative transportation modes.  With narrow roads, frequent driveways, and a well-gridded layout, automobile drivers intuitively reduce their speed, often as low as 15 miles per hour, well below the 20 mile per hour threshold where the dominance of cars begins to wane.

Margonelli notes the use of golf carts in the Pismo Dunes, which can be a fine choice for seniors no longer capable of handling an auto.

I can add another transportation option.  A North Bay reader emailed me extolling her adult tricycle, noting the improved mobility which it has given her and including a photo of a Napa senior on a tricycle touring the damage on the morning after the recent earthquake.  An adult tricycle can be another fine alternative transportation choice within a mobile home park.

Also, walking within a mobile home park is often safer than walking on city streets.

Against the positives noted by Margonelli and by me, there is a legitimate list of concerns about mobile home parks as a housing solution, including some that touch upon the councilmember’s concerns.

Heading the list is construction quality.  Margonelli notes that quality of mobile homes has been improving.  She’s likely correct, but mobile homes still remain at the lower-end of the construction spectrum.  And it seems inevitable that they’ll remain at the lower-end.

During my time on the Rebuilding Together board, we often debated how much money to allocate toward mobile home repair.  Although we never went as far as another affiliate which limited mobile home repairs to one-third of their annual budget, we remained aware of the potential black hole of mobile home repairs.  Many years, we could have spent our entire budget on mobile homes and still left needs unmet.  Plus we found that repairs to stick-built construction were less likely to require return visits in future years.

Next, the density of most mobile home parks is insufficient to support urban uses such as stores or pubs.  (Margonelli notes that a grocery store is within walking distance of Pismo Dunes, but the store is beyond the boundary of the mobile home park and even then remains an anomaly.)  It’s the inherent nature of the single-story, non-shared-wall development to spread out, reducing the number of residents within walkable distance of businesses.

Furthermore, the nature of most mobile home parks is to be enclosed, with limited entry points and few opportunities for others to pass through a park enroute to other destinations.  But the nature of an effective urban community to be well-gridded, allowing efficient travel, which is essential for those on foot or bicycles.

Perhaps the only location is which mobile home parks don’t undermine an urban land-use configuration is where they back against any geographical feature that would have already precluded urban connections.  It’s not coincidental that Pismo Dunes backs up to an ocean beach or that many of the Petaluma mobile home parks adjoin a freeway.

But the biggest concern about mobile home parks, at least to me, is the social insulation.  I’ve been reading “The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser.  His thesis is that personalization of internet experiences, by which Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others feed us articles consistent with what they’ve calculated to be our interest and values, undermines the free flow of objective information on which our democracy depends.

The internet personalization models against which he rails is evident in our every internet session.  In the last week, I’ve researched travel options in Ireland and senior living facilities in the North Bay.  Now, I can’t go anywhere on the internet without being bombarded by ads for Irish tour services and North Bay senior living options.  It feels both creepy and intrusive.

Similarly, I had a frequent commenter on Petaluma Patch who was continually offering links to anti-urbanism articles from obscure and credibility-challenged sources.  At first, I marveled at his misplaced diligence in finding these articles.

However, I came to realize that he had created a filter bubble in which the internet was feeding him anti-urban articles.  He had only to go on-line to have an article shoved in front of him which, with dubious fact and flawed logic, seemed to rebut something I had written.  And he then felt a need to accept the article as the truth and to share it.

It was a shame that the opportunity for the two of us to have a rational exchange of perspectives was undermined by the internet.

Urbanism combats the personalization trend on the internet.  I love the idea of a CEO and a mail clerk talking in the elevator of an apartment building where both live, each if one is in a penthouse when the other is in a micro-apartment.  Similarly, I like watching various demographic segments chatting in a downtown pub. 

My personal hell would be to live among folks who are like me and who think as I do.  Even as I age, I want to live among people who offer new and thought-provoking perspectives.  We already offer too few of these opportunities and mobile home parks, by their very nature, are part of the deficiency.

Summing it up, while Margonelli makes a reasonable case for mobile home parks, I favor the position of the councilmember.  As a housing solution, particularly as we move toward a more urban world, we can and should do better than mobile home parks.

By the way, nothing here is intended to disparage the residents of mobile home parks nor to criticize the choice of people who find enjoyment in their mobile homes.  Instead, it is to castigate the rest of us for creating a world in which mobile homes, with all their deficiencies, are the only option for many folks.

In my next post, I’ll write about water conservation.  Candidates for the Petaluma City Council have been talking about a moratorium on building permits while the drought persists.  I applaud the concern, but will argue that another approach would be more appropriate.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Jane Jacobs Density

I recently wrote twice (here and again here) about an attack on the California approach to density and the effective rebuttals to the attack.    Density has returned as a hot topic among urbanists, but from a different perspective.

The first broaching of the subject came on a Friday morning two weeks ago when Edward T. McMahon of the Urban Land Institute blogged about the density pendulum.  His concern that the pendulum, having spent a more than a half-century on the drivable suburban  end of its range, was at risk of going too far the other way.  McMahon was troubled that high rises were being proposed in too many places.  He argued that well-configured mid-rises could provide effective urban densities and that high-rises would destroy the feel of cities and create lifeless canyons at street level.

Urbanist Richard Florida gave a keynote address that evening at the Congress of the New Urbanism.   It was an excellent speech, in which he strongly endorsed McMahon’s arguments.  He described high-rises as vertical sprawl and suggested that what cities really need is “Jane Jacobs density”, by which he meant mid-rises that support street life, not crush it.

I recommend the entire Florida video linked above, but expect  that not many folks can spend an hour watching a video.  (If you do watch, you should skip the first eleven minutes.  You’d only miss a handful of announcements.)  If you don’t watch the video, these are some of the other points that he made:

·         In the twenty years since the first Congress for the New Urbanism conference, there has been a sea change in land-use.  The world is now alert to urbanism in a way that was inconceivable at the first conference.

·         In noting some of the disastrous urban policies that were implemented in the post-war years, he said that the best neighborhoods today are the ones that no one thought to touch.

·         He recounted that many considered urbanism to be a fad that would be die first from the dot.com crash, then from 9/11, and then from the great recession, but urbanism instead continued to get stronger.

·         In describing the character that he seeks from Jane Jacobs density, he coined the phrase “quality of place”.

·         Lastly, he encouraged the next generation of urbanists not to be seduced by data and spreadsheets, but to take a walk to look at how cities really work.

Robert Steuteville of Better! Towns and Cities blogged about Florida’s speech, including the point about Jane Jacobs density.  He also delved more deeply into Florida’s comments on “quality of place.”

Lastly, Florida weighed back in with a piece for Atlantic Cites, for whom he serves as Senior Editor.  He reiterated the points he made a few days before in his speech. 

I’ll add only one comment to these worthy thinkers.  Except for the aesthetic concern about streets becoming dark canyons amidst a forest of high-rises, the debate needn’t be about mid-rises versus high-rises.  The challenge is to encourage people to be on the street, mingling with their neighbors and adding to the creativity powers of cities.

Home size is a likely a factor.  I think that someone in a 400 square foot home on the 25th floor who joins friends in a pub to watch the big game adds more energy to the city than someone in a 2,000 square foot home on the second floor who has the room to watch the game by himself.

I’m not arguing that we should restrict home sizes in urban settings.  Some residents, particularly large families, need large homes.  But we should recognize the potential impacts of larger units and attempt to internalize the costs.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

California Density Remains a Hot Topic

In a recent post, I wrote about a war of words being contested on the internet.  Anti-urbanist gadfly Wendell Cox had written an article for the Wall Street Journal.  He argued that California residents were fleeing the state over efforts to change the housing mix.  His effort was logically flawed.  The mistakes were gleefully pointed out by Josh Stevens of the California Planning and Development Report and by Jonathan Rothwell of The New Republic.

Although the Cox article seemed effectively rebutted by the first two responses, the article remained an attractive target, so the piling on continued.

Greg Hanscom of Grist.org pointed out the logic failures of the Cox article with humor and wit.  My favorite flight of hyperbole:

“Saying that California, or the entire nation, has declared war on the suburbs? That’s like a spoiled frat boy whining that his parents have declared war on his trust fund because they’ve cut him back to just a keg of beer and a pound of weed each week.”

And then one of the big guns of new urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, entered the fray with a review of the philosophical underpinning of urbanism.

If the Stevens and Rothwell articles didn’t already convinced you of the wrong-headedness of Wendell Cox, the two articles above probably aren’t going to sway you either.  But the four rebuttals show the breadth of urbanist thinking, from humor to the exposure of logical fallacies to the underlying philosophy.  Perhaps Wendell Cox did urbanism a favor by providing a convenience focal point for the barrage.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Density Battles

A quick note on links. I often try to provide links that fully fill out a storyline. If you have twenty minutes to explore an aspect of urbanism in depth, I highly recommend the links. However, I know that many readers have only a few minutes to spare before their daily job obligations intrude. For those readers, I try to provide a quicker summary in my comments surrounding the links. How you choose to read this blog is entirely up to you.

A few weeks ago, John King of the San Francisco Chronicle announced the surprising news that California makes up much of the national list of the densest metropolitan areas. The data was somewhat puzzling. Perhaps the biggest indication of a dubious methodology was that Delano, in Kern County, was calculated to be the fourth densest area in the country.

In his article, King provided some hints about where the methodology went astray. One factor was that the boundaries of metropolitan areas were determined by subjective and bureaucratic assessment of collective job markets. That is, if more people from Delano commuted the thirty miles to Bakersfield, then Delano and the land in between would have been folded into the Bakersfield metropolitan area, causing the density to plummet.

An even bigger factor, to which King alludes, is California topography. Most of the major metropolitan areas of California, San Francisco, San Jose, the East Bay, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego, are confined by either water or unbuildably steep terrain. Thus, residential development can’t continue sparsely into the hinterlands, dragging down density.

To check the validity of this topography hypothesis, I checked overall state density. Using 2010 census data, California has a population density of 237.0 people per square mile. In comparison, New York is 413.9 people per square mile. Looking at the other states that contribute to the New York City metropolitan area, Connecticut is at 726.3 people per square mile and New Jersey is at a whopping 1,174 people per square mile. California would have to contain over 180 million people before it would equal New Jersey’s density.

California is far more dense than Alaska or Wyoming, but its status as the centerpiece of American urban density is a bureaucratic and topographic fallacy.

Nonetheless, the meme of California density quickly took root on the internet. Wendell Cox, whose Demographia website is a well-known heckler of urbanism, had an article published in the Wall Street Journal criticizing what he perceived as a California governmental bias toward density.

The Cox article is a compilation of misstatements, half-truths, and logical fallacies. Josh Stevens of the California Planning and Development Report does a fine job of demolishing the Cox article. I found his strongest argument to be the is/ought argument. Just because something, such as suburban densities, has evolved in a particular way doesn’t mean that it ought to have evolved that way or to be allowed to continue on the same path.

The only argument I’d add to Stevens’ effort is to note the wrongheadedness of Cox’s issue with urbanist development being the expected predominant type of new construction. If the majority of Americans prefer walkable urban but the existing housing stock is more slanted to drivable suburban, then it’s reasonable to expect new development to favor walkable urban until the housing stock matches housing preferences. That’s a free market principal.

Bouncing the rubble of Cox’s argument, especially on the is/ought point, the New Republic weighed in with an explanation that low-density development wasn’t an expression of the free market, but a predictable result of a past set of governmental rules and attitudes.

Overall, the whole pro and con argument was a good example of how the internet should work. A new subject entered the cyberspace debate chamber. Various arguments were presented, some spurious and some logical. And truth eventually won out. If only the internet always worked as well.

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Administrative note: Several readers have expressed frustration that they’ve been unable to decipher the mysteries of the RSS feed from Google BlogSpot. I’ve been equally unable to find a solution. However, I can offer an alternative solution. If you’ll provide your email address, I’ll be happy to send an email (by bcc) whenever I publish a new post. It’ll be the same text, in 140 characters or less, that I post on Twitter.

If you want to take advantage, I suggest you email me with your email address. Unless you really want to test the phishing community by putting it in the comments below.

Whether or not you ask for an email notification, please know that I appreciate my readers.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated. Please comment below or email me. And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Building Community Consensus about Density

Spreading urbanism into towns and suburbs will usually increase density. That aspect of urbanism will often cause opposition. Thus far, we’ve talked about the objections that have been raised by groups that have philosophical problems with increasing density, such as the Agenda 21ers. But more significant opposition for most projects is from the local community. Even when a community has a shared vision of urbanism and increasing density, consensus around a specific project can be difficult.

These issues were highlighted in a recent Urban Land Institute program, “How to Add Density to Affluent Communities”. The session was held in the new library in downtown Lafayette. Most of the content pertained to Lafayette, which is more affluent than many North Bay communities. But many of the lessons that were offered still had broad pertinence.

The speakers, Lafayette City Manager Steve Falk, Matt Branagh of Branagh Development, and Rick Dishnica of Dishnica Company, LLC, collectively made the following points:

1. Community consensus is essential. But as essential as it might be, it can still be hard to reach and requires good facilitation skills.

2. Community consensus can be aided if desirable trade-offs are identified and implemented. In Lafayette, increased density in the downtown core is seen as the cost of the most restrictive ridgeline protection ordinance in the state. The Lafayette community is willing to accept that trade.

3. Even when there is a community consensus, individual projects will still have hurdles to overcome. It is easy for the community to say “We support increased density in general, but not when it looks like that project.”

I think all three points are sound. But when I try to mentally apply the process to the North Bay, I bump into a problem. To build and to continue to support a consensus, long-range city planning staffs are probably the key element. Not the planners who are engaged in day-to-day entitlement processing, but the planners who engage the communities in discussions about long-range visions.

And yet, in the days before the ongoing economic downturn, many cities increasingly tried to tie planning department funding to entitlement proceeds, directing fewer general fund dollars toward long-range planning. That trend was exacerbated by the downturn, which put crushing pressures on the general funds.

I don’t have a solution. I understand the financial pressures under which cities are now working. It wouldn’t be fair to cavalierly call for more funds for long-range planning.

But at the same, it’s essential to recognize the conflict. A crucial tool that we need to begin digging out of the economic hard times, planning staff who is ready and willing to help build community consensus, is a tool that isn’t available because of the hard times.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated. Please comment below or email me. And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)