Checking Up on Sprawl

Sprawl largely stopped dead during the recession, leaving analysts pondering whether the development paradigm had truly changed or if the slowdown was solely the result of a lack of demand in a stalled economy.

Today, I remain skeptical about the long-term strength of the economy, fearing that more bumps will come our way from the accumulated debt of our failed dalliance with suburbia.  However, with the economy showing at least temporary signs of life, it’s worth checking to see if sprawl is making a comeback.

There’s much evidence that the past momentum of sprawl has been reversed.  Driven by the lifestyle choices of younger demographic segments, the outflow of jobs from urban centers has reversed and jobs are returning downtown in most markets.

Also, the sprawling and half-completed subdivisions that were stranded throughout the west by the recession remain enough of a phenomenon that the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has prepared a position paper on “zombie subdivisions”, suggesting strategies for resolving the current half-defunct subdivisions and proposing policies to preventing another generation of failed subdivisions during future economic hard times.

But these indications that sprawl is truly dying are somewhat balanced by a story out of Las Vegas in which a stalled subdivision outside of the city is being rebooted after a change in architecture from a more dense, alley-based urbanist style to more stand-alone suburban-style homes.

(There is another question implicit in the Las Vegas project, which is whether an urban-appearing project that is remains largely remote from urban amenities and requires a car for most trips is truly urbanist or only an architectural conceit?  Michael Lewyn tackles the question with regard to a dense but car-oriented project outside of Boston.

Lewyn concludes that the Boston project isn’t bad, although part of his reasoning involves a Burger King a mile away, a distance that is generally beyond the regular walking range of most folks and definitely beyond the walking range for all but the most intrepid during the Boston winter of 2015.

I hold a more firmly negative attitude toward the Boston project, believing that, until walkability and transit serve the project, it is no better than car-oriented suburbia.  The only reason to prefer it to low-density suburbia is the possibility that it can someday be served by walkability and transit.)

However, the Las Vegas situation controversy pivots on a different point, which is the argument of the developers that suburban-style McMansions are what people want and the response of urbanists that developers were too quick to abandon the more-urbanist model when the slow sales were more likely the result of the economy and not the housing configuration.

Personally, I make a different argument, which is that the issue is solely about economics and pricing the alternatives accurately.

If chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream had the same price, there might be a fifty-fifty split between those who would choose one and those who would choose the other.  But if chocolate was suddenly three times more expensive, then the split would move sharply in favor of vanilla.  Heck, I’m frugal enough that I’d be one of those making the switch.

Given of a choice of a Ford or a Porsche at the same price, most folks would go for the Porsche.   But if they had to write a check for the actual market price, the Ford would become the overwhelming choice.

It’s the way markets work and they should be celebrated for the way they create wealth while balancing supply and demand.

But when we get to land use, we subvert the signals.  We don’t tax gasoline to account for the environmental or geopolitical costs, so effectively subsidize driving to remote subdivisions.  We charge a flat rate property tax instead of putting higher taxes on folks who need more roads for their daily life.

We then assume that that the split between suburban and urban sales reflects a true lifestyle preference, when all it’s really doing is bouncing back rational financial responses to distorted economic incentives.

The argument then goes further down the rabbit hole when fringe political groups, who claim to champion the free market system, describe urbanism as collectivism and argue for a continuation of the current system of subsidizing suburbia.  It’s enough to make one’s head hurt.

We’ve gone so far down this path of flawed economic signals that backing our way out will be difficult.  But in my next post, I’ll continue the discussion with a thought experiment. 

Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds: In a local update, Petaluma Urban Chat met a few days ago to review three alternative conceptual plans for reuse of the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds.  The consensus was that all three plans offered good ideas, but that one of plans was a half-step ahead, so would become the base onto which the good ideas from the other plans would be grafted.

The key element of primary plan is a park of perhaps four acres, angling away from the intersection of Payran and D Streets, framed by mid-rise residential buildings on both sides and terminating in a taller mixed-use building, with residential above a public market.

A team of five Urban Chat members was selected to continue the conceptual design effort at weekly meetings.  (Note: This aggressive meeting schedule will require cancelling the general Urban Chat meeting for March to avoid over-commitments.)

Also, it was decided that efforts to mold public opinion with the completed conceptual design would require better graphics than could be accomplished using the tools available to the Urban Chat members.  Thus, the idea was hatched to attempt a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for presentation graphics, with the further hope that the funds could be stretched by identifying design professionals willing to work at reduced rates.

If anyone is willing to champion a Kickstarter effort, please let me know.

And if anyone not at the most recent meeting would like to see the three plans, also let me know.  I’m available many evenings to chat about the process, the status, and the design concepts.  I’d prefer to chat over a beer at a downtown pub.

It’s been a fun and exciting process thus far, and neither the fun nor the excitement is yet over.

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

Final Thoughts from San Diego County

Two months ago, I traveled to San Diego County with a companion.  Our only goal was tourism.  But there’s no off-switch for the urbanism chip in my brain, so I collected and have already shared thoughts about a shipping container waffle shop in Carlsbad that might have application to Petaluma, the seaside district of San Clemente, and the wide residential streets of San Diego.  Today, I’ll empty my mental notebook with final thoughts about Carlsbad.

We visited Carlsbad because it’s where my parents were living when I was born.  Their home was on Elm Street, only a few short blocks from the downtown shopping district.  It makes me happy to think that I was brought first brought home to a house on the comfortably-named Elm Street, within a short walk of retail.  It’s a “Leave It to Beaver” moment for me.

As we learned during our trip, the home is long gone.  As my mother remembers its structural condition, the home was ready for demolition in 1953.  So I can’t mourn its loss.  However, I can bemoan what happened to its setting.   Much of the lot was claimed for the widening of Elm Street from two lanes to four lanes plus median.  The remainder is now covered by a gas station. 

There is something symbolically disturbing about having one’s first home converted to an extra-wide street and a gas station.  That history adds more meaning to my writing on urbanism.

Even worse, Elm Street has been renamed to Carlsbad Village Drive.  Note to City Councils everywhere: If you include “Village” in the name of a newly-widened four-lane street in the hope that your residents will still think of their community as a village, it’s too late.  The battle has already been lost.  And the street name looks silly.

The downtown district shopping remains active and prosperous, which was fine to see.  And having a working commuter rail station in the downtown area was also good.

But it’s ominous that downtown has expanded only slightly since 1953, when it served perhaps 3,000 people.  With Carlsbad now nearing 110,000 people, it’s obvious that most folks are shopping elsewhere, likely in drivable suburban retail stores.

But the real insight about San Diego County came one afternoon.  We took a detour to a historic park named after a Southern California singing star of the 1950s.  The drive took nearly twenty minutes, all of it on four-lane divided arterials.  Other than a woman walking to her car, I don’t think we saw a single pedestrian.

Instead, we saw street after street of recently-built single-family homes on large lots.  The only relief was a couple of golf courses, the loading docks of two pedestrian-unfriendly shopping centers, and a few barrancas that were too steep to be developed.

When I’m out and about in the North Bay, I often ponder how communities would respond if gas prices were to skyrocket to $10 per gallon or more.  There are neighborhoods for which adjustments would be difficult.  But in many places, people have possible walks to transit stops or retail opportunities.  Perhaps not walks which they currently make, but walks to which they could adjust.

When I ask the same question about the suburban sprawl of southern Carlsbad, I don’t have an answer.  I assume that bus routes could be added, but there is little infrastructure in place to support transit and the routes would be long, winding, and time-consuming, with many folks needing to take multiple buses.

I’m convinced that people find a way to believe what they need to believe.  Sometimes because it is convenient or saves the effort of looking for alternatives.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Many people retain the religion in which they were raised or drink the brand of beer that their peer group drinks.  If they’re comfortable in those continuations, good for them.

But sometimes folks hold their beliefs because the alternative is unacceptable.  Northern San Diego County is known as a center of climate change denial.  When I look at the Carlsbad sprawl, the reason seems obvious.  If climate change is happening and lifestyle changes must be made, then living in Carlsbad will become far less comfortable.  And property values will fall because buyers wouldn’t want the new lifetstyle either.

We’ve built a world in which people must deny an overwhelming scientific consensus to protect their investments and to justify their lifestyle choices.  That’s both unfortunate and scary.

San Diego County is a lovely place, but it’s underlain with troubling realities.  I doubt I’ll soon visit again.

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 Gaining Ground, but the Outcome May Remain in Doubt in the North Bay

For the last few posts, I’ve riffed on arguments made by Jeff Speck in his book “Walkable City”.  It’s been a remarkably easy way to write, because Speck offers a wealth of riff-worthy arguments.

I’ll continue on this path for today before leaving Speck for awhile.  But I will return to “Walkable City”.  It’s a remarkable book that I continue to recommend highly.

Speck argues that the battle between urbanism and sprawl is tending different directions in different places.  There is much confirmation to be found.  Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council looks at the numbers and points to places where sprawl seems to have the upper hand.  Closer to home, Sacramento County has recently approved a project that appears to be textbook sprawl.  Ultimately, I’m thankful to live in the North Bay where we haven’t been as fully seduced by sprawl.

From Speck’s introduction:

“We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities – after forgetting for four – yet we’ve somehow not be able to pull it off.  Jane Jacobs, who wrote in 1960, won over the planners by 1980.  But the planners have yet to win over the city.

“Certain large cities, yes.  If you make your home in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, or a handful of other special places, you can have some confidence that things are on the right track.  But those locations are the exception.  In the small and midsized cities where most Americans spend their lives, the daily decisions of local officials are still, more often than not, making their lives worse.  This is not bad planning, but the absence of planning, or rather, decision-making disconnected from planning.  The planners were so wrong for so many years that now that they are mostly right, they are mostly ignored.”

Benfield concurs, looking in depth at where sprawl continues to be the predominant form of new land use.  Consistent with Speck’s observation, Benfield finds sprawl occurring not in metropolises, but in the hinterlands.

Closer to the North Bay is a recent land-use approval in Sacramento County.  On a controversial vote reported in the Sacramento Bee, the County Supervisors approved an 8,000-home master plan on 2,700-acre site, which is a disheartening 3 homes per acre.  The approval was based on the hope of a university occupying a portion of the land, an anticipation that, if not a complete pipedream, is at least unlikely.

Luckily, the North Bay, although not yet a bastion of urbanism, hasn’t been as badly seduced by sprawl.  Perhaps “stroads” function as our canary in the mineshaft.

Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns writes about stroads, a coined word for a roadway that a part rural highway and part city street, usually an overwhelming width of pavement with too many driveways, often accessing outsized retail, and providing an inhospitable environment for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Folks in the North Bay sometimes ask me to point to a stroad in our part of the world.  I struggle with the question.  Perhaps South Santa Rosa Boulevard in Santa Rosa?  Or maybe Soscol Avenue in Napa?  But neither is nearly as bad as the Midwest examples to which Marohn points.

One of the North Bay folks recently took a trip to Albuquerque.  He reported back that now he had truly seen what a stroad was.  And that he was thankful to live in the North Bay where we didn’t have stroads.

He’s right.  The North Bay wasn’t as fully seduced by sprawl as many other places.  Benfield doesn’t list the North Bay among his worst sprawl offenders.  But Speck would put us among the places where there are lessons still to be learned and minds to be changed.

The transition to urbanism will be easier for the North Bay.  But it’s a transition that still must be made.  The North Bay may have a competitive advantage over other regions because we have a headstart on urbanism.  But it’s a headstart that we can squander if we don’t pay attention.

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