Lecture Notes: The Sprawl Debate

(Gillham chaps 4, 5, 8 and 9—we skip 6 and 7 on transport, energy and health)

Chap. 4

In defense of sprawl:

Pop growth demands larger development area; that’s just the way it is, and pop growth is inevitable given national trends.

Home ownership is worthwhile goal, and is actually the formal policy of the US government to encourage and assist with home ownership. This is enabled by inexpensive land, subsidized mortgages, etc.)

Maximum mobility is offered in suburban pattern: daily mobility and life-cycle mobility as families grow and shrink, as owners change jobs and retire, etc.

Personal freedoms and choices are enhanced, anti-sprawl regulations can limit them.—we’ll read all about this in Randall O’Toole’s essays (see his web site).

Apparently the pattern of choice! (discuss supply vs. demand): if this is true who are planners and land use activists to try to stand in its way?

Urban and rural alternatives still exist, so people can still choose other patterns if they wish.

So, why all the hubub?

Is this a battle over aesthetics? (we’ll come back to that)

NIMBY’ism by the suburbanites themselves? They don’t like the same dev going in next to them?

Anti-sprawl groups: roots in environmental causes, but also in social equity, groups worried about racial and class divisions being made concrete in the geography.

Pro-development groups

The Indictment: Sprawl is bad because it causes:

Loss of open land, ag land, and habitat (more loss per capita)

Traffic/congestion: grows faster than pop growth in spread-out development.

Cost of dev and services (increased cost per dwelling unit): especially residential development does not seem able to pay for its own costs in the current tax regime.

Equity (extraction of wealth from older neighborhoods, often leaving poor behind, marooned in the inner cities and inner, older, decaying suburbs, where gov’t invests less in terms of services and schools,. Etc.)

Aesthetics (despoiling the landscape) and losing community: mass-produced, sameness, etc.

Pro-development

We have plenty of land and space: just a few percent of the land area is urbanized.

Traffic congestion is really only in older cities, actually less in suburbs where trips are dispersed in different diorecitons.

Cost of dev and services studies may be wrong---very tricky to measure in comparable way.

Anti-sprawl programs actually cause more problems, take away choices, cause congestion, and reduce freedoms.

The concern over sprawl is Cyclical: when growth is fast, people worry about sprawl and demand that gov do something.

Chapter 5 Land and Habitat

Is there enough land for sprawling development? The answer is very much yes, only a small fraction of the land in the US has been developed, though this fraction is poorly enumerated. Conservative estimates (in this case conservative also means those offered by conservative think tanks) is that about 5% of the US land area is developed. So it looks like there is lots of land left.

But, almost a third of the US is federal land not open to development, and another, unknown fraction (Gillham has a few estimates) is in state and local protection or private protection. So, maybe something like 10% or more of the "developable" land I the US is already developed. (I think this is an underestimate because it neglects a lot of infrastructure, low density development, and developments on agricultural lands, but I can’t back up my estimate better than anybody else, and I do thin that agricultural land loss is over-stated).

Don’t get hooked on these numbers, they won’t be on the exam, but just realize that the bruhaha is about local landscapes, some of which are heavily developed, with vanishing open spaces near where people live, and important farmland and wildlife habitat being developed. Essentially Gillham is saying that not all undeveloped land is equally valuable, so that sprawl skeptics who quite the 5% figure but include all land (incl federal) in their base are trying to understate the problem.

Chap 8: Economics

[Note: we did not get into the "Equity" part of this chapter, and that material won’t be on the exam]

Indictment: sprawl costs more than compact development, is subsidized in various ways.

Questions:

• Comparative capital infrastructure costs
• Hidden and open subsidies
• Costs of inefficient growth patterns
• Tax issues, commercial development

Capital Infrastructure

Benfield and Chen: review shows sprawl costs more than early-suburban patterns and than more dense alternatives, when compared in the typical way of such studies: Schools, roads, sewer, water, etc. compared to higher vs lower densitiy residential and commercial development (Burchell et al --- NJ studies)

Infrastructure costs per unit are higher in suburban compared to urban, but maybe there are some surprises---O’Toole, Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson at Univ of So Calif. argue that dense costs are as high or higher (think about the costs of re-doing a road or pipeline in Manhattan!).

Subsidies:

Old subsidies the new. Tallahassee sewer hookup: 5K in dev areas, 11K outside.

State and federal highway funds spread out the costs to all tax payers, including drivers in uncongested areas.

Auto transport infrastructure is subsidized, but so is mass transit, at an even higher rate per user (proponents argue that as we move to more transit then the unit costs will come down).

Inefficient regional growth patterns:

New areas cannabalize older neighborhoods and communities; e.g., core area Boulder schools closed downtown for new ones outside of the core area here all the growth in student numbers is.

Retail malls built that steal business form other malls.

Local Taxes

Residential does not pay for itself, commercial taxes make up costs.

Chap. 9: Community Aesthetics

Is this really a debate about aesthetics, about how cookie-cutter subdivisions don’t "look" very nice?

Discuss this proposition in class.