Tag Archives: sprawl

Self-driving cars could make sprawl even more popular

Posted on by

Suburban sprawl has its critics but self-driving cars may just make long commutes more palatable:

As driving becomes less onerous and computer-controlled systems reduce traffic, some experts worry that will eliminate a powerful incentive—commuting sucks—for living near cities, where urban density makes for more efficient sharing of resources. In other words, autonomous vehicles could lead to urban sprawl.

It’s simple, says Ken Laberteaux, a senior scientist at Toyota. If you make transportation faster, easier and perhaps cheaper, then people won’t mind commuting. “What a consumer is expected to do is see what they can gain by moving a little further from the job centers or the cultural centers,” he says. That’s bad news: Urban sprawl is linked to economic, environmental, and health hardships…

Laberteaux’s not the only one concerned about this. Autonomous vehicles should ease highway congestion, and commuters will be able to catch up on work or sleep en route to the office. That limits the incentive to trade your McMansion for a brownstone, says Reid Ewing, director of the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Research Center. The implications of this go beyond transportation; in a 2014 report for advocacy group Smart Growth America, Ewing linked sprawl to obesity and economic immobility.

Ewing likens autonomous driving to the construction of “superhighways” during the post-war boom years, which spurred suburbanization. “If you can travel at higher speeds with less congestion and you can use your time productively while you’re traveling in a self-driving car, the generalized cost of travel will be less on a vehicle-per-mile basis,” says Ewing. “Just like when, before the interstate system, people were traveling at 30 miles per hour, there wasn’t nearly the spread of development that there is today.”

The car is a remarkable invention that with adaptation (oil doesn’t seem to be quite running out, alternative fuel sources, etc.) could be around for a long time. So, perhaps the real answer to limiting sprawl is simply getting rid of cars or finding more and more ways to incentive not owning a car.

McMansions “bloom” in China

Posted on by

One fact about McMansions and one assertion: they are in China and they are “growing.”

In the Dianshan Lake region, less than 40 miles west of central Shanghai, the appetite for speculative real estate has driven developers into China’s most fertile land, the Yangtze Delta. Only about half of the luxury villas like those on the following pages, which can be as big as 6,300 square feet and sell for as much as $1.5 million, are occupied — mostly as second homes. The rest sit empty, as the housing sector staggers under a surplus. The photographer George Steinmetz, who visited the area last fall, describes the transition as converting “rice farms to high-end McMansions.” As that process plays out, the country’s domestic rice consumption is set to soon outpace rice production.

This highlights two small trends in reporting on McMansions:

1. People like to note the spread of McMansions around the world. I’ve seen articles talking about McMansions in China, Russia, and different parts of Europe, Africa, and Latin America. It is a unique American export that requires a supporting infrastructure of a wealthy upper middle-class, roads, power, and sewers, and space for large single-family homes. Outside of the United States, McMansions are most common in Australia and still limited elsewhere.

2. The idea of McMansions “growing” or “blooming” fits in with ideas about suburban sprawl as well as the land McMansions often replace. Critics of McMansions lament the loss of open land or fields, particularly when replaced by energy inefficient homes. At the same time, blooming might suggests McMansions are like flowers while some would prefer the comparison be made to weeds.

Watching metropolitan sprawl from space

Posted on by

Check out a set of interesting GIFs showing sprawl in metropolitan regions:

A couple things jumped out at him while studying these animations. “It is interesting to see the ‘greening’ of the mid-ring suburbs of the ’70 to the ’90s as the tree canopies matured,” he says. “This is in contrast to the concrete jungles of prewar neighborhoods and the virgin developments of the 21st century.” (Look again at Dallas/Fort Worth for a good example.)

A few other trends he noticed: Some cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, grow lighter over time, an apparent consequence of newer, white-roofed buildings crowding out older ones with dark roof tiles. And the shrinking of water sources, whether manmade or natural, is a “sad site to behold,” Williams says. “On the other hand, the creation of artificial land in coastal metropolises is increasingly larger in scale (re: Shanghai).”

If one thinks that any sort of sprawl is bad because it takes up more land, leads to deconcentrated regions, necessarily leads to McMansions and more driving, or other reasons, the images of American cities may look bad. But, the animations of American cities show sprawl on a different scale than that of some global cities. The American regions show more filling in between existing settlements, particularly in more established Northaast and Midwest cities. Sunbelt cities may look more like cities in developing countries where cities have simply exploded rather than filled in.

It is also interesting to consider sprawl from this particular vantage point: via satellites. The average suburbanite might consider sprawl at a closer level; the nearby field that disappeared for a housing development, the increase in traffic as new residents add to the local congestion, the notices about cheaper houses on the metropolitan fringe. But, satellite images and maps help remind us of the broader nature of sprawl: if the region is a circle with the city in the middle, expanding sprawl moves out the outer ring of the circle, adding more and more square miles that is only generally bounded by a large body of water (or perhaps another metropolitan region).

Predicting the ongoing rapid urbanization of the South

Posted on by

The American South is known for its sprawling cities and one new model suggests this will continue in force in coming decades:

New predictions map the future spread of urban sprawl in Dixie, and it is immense. Basing their model on past growth patterns and locations of existing road networks, researchers at North Carolina State University projected the region’s expansion decades into the future. According to their forecast, the Southern urban footprint is expected to grow 101 percent to 192 percent.

The projected map in 2060:

Read the full paper here. As the discussion section notes, the model doesn’t really account for future decisions in opposition to current patterns. In other words, such a model is not deterministic: it is based on past data but communities could make decisions that continue down this path (and even intensify urban growth beyond the predictions here) or pursue different patterns of urban growth (say if New Urbanism catches on in a big way and exurban growth slows quite a bit).

Put another way, is it possible to imagine an American South that in 50 or 100 years wouldn’t be noted for its sprawl?

Fireworks limited by suburban sprawl

Posted on by

Fireworks shows are now limited by newer guidelines and more sprawl:

“What’s happened is, the size shell that you can shoot in a particular location has decreased,” Taylor explains. Just as shell width correlates to height, so too does height correlate with regulation. Old regulations dictated that you needed 70 feet of area cleared for every inch of shell fired around a launch area. The new industry standard is 100 feet. So when you play that out, practically, a large 12-inch shell needs 1,200 feet (or nearly a quarter of a mile) cleared in every direction to be considered safe.

Taylor tells me that fireworks sites nationwide have been shrinking with both urbanization and suburban sprawl. And fellow fireworks company Pyrotecnico echoes the sentiment. “What we’re finding is that sites are shrinking,” explains Pyrotecnico Creative Director Rocco Vitale. “Growth is happening. More buildings are going up. And when that happens at a site, a show you could use six-inch shells two years ago becomes a place for four-inch shells.”

Neither company feels that the end product has suffered as a result: Since the extra expense per each inch of shell grows almost exponentially, the savings made from downsizing can be reinvested into the experience.

“Rather than one eight-inch shell, I could probably put 12 three-inch shells up for the same price,” Taylor says. “We like that for several reasons. Larger shells are more dangerous because they have more explosive power in them. But the truth is, people in this country especially like density in their fireworks show.”

So perhaps the best solution is to find large, empty pieces of land that people have to travel to in order to see more impressive fireworks. Or, if available, communities could use bodies of water which also add the bonus of the reflective surface. Yet, many communities shoot fireworks from parks which tend to be close to other things.

There is an odd juxtaposition with this story. The headline reads: “How McMansions Murdered Big Fireworks.” Then the final short paragraph: “So it wasn’t your imagination. Fireworks have gotten smaller over the years. But there’s a bright side: The public may be safer, and happier, for it.” The headline invokes evil McMansions and the desecration of sacred fireworks shows. The story suggests this is all because we want fireworks to be safer and people tend to like more dense fireworks anyway. That’s a McMansion clickbait headline if I’ve every seen one…

Ikea is raising pay to help workers but many who need jobs can’t easily make it to their suburban locations

Posted on by

Jamelle Bouie points out that Ikea is doing a good thing in raising wages but their jobs aren’t easily accessible to many who need them:

With that said, it’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes. Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes.

What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations make them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods…

The result is that, for both groups—but low-income blacks in particular—there is a “spatial mismatch” between neighborhoods and employment opportunities.

Put simply, the greater the sprawl of jobs in an area, the less likely it is that black residents will have easy and reliable access to them. Or, as UCLA professor Michael Stoll writes in a 2005 paper for the Brookings Institution, “Blacks are more geographically isolated from jobs in high job-sprawl areas regardless of region, metropolitan area size, and their share of metropolitan population.” And this isn’t an accident: “Metropolitan areas characterized by higher job sprawl also exhibit more severe racial segregation between blacks and whites,” he writes.

All of this is exacerbated by our shoddy, car-centric transportation policy. To get to any job in a place like Virginia Beach, Virginia—where 10- to 15-mile drives are a fact of life—you need a car. Yes, there is a public transportation system, but it’s irregular (the agency had a rate of 18 missed trips per day in March), limited in scope, and unreliable for most workers who need to be on time. But cars are expensive, and black and Latino households are much less likely to own cars than their white counterparts. What comes next is predictable: Plenty of low-income people can’t find or keep jobs because they are isolated from opportunities.

All correct though the increasing number of lower-income suburban residents may be closer to some of these Ikea stores. At the same time, most suburban residents will still need cars to get to the store, vehicles that are relatively expensive parts of household budgets.

Additionally, this helps highlight some of the contradictory nature of Ikea. On one hand, it is a quirky store in the American landscape, exposing Americans to interesting designs and promoting a more DIY mentality. On the other hand, it is just another big box store with locations near major highways, big parking lots, and lots of square footage.

Drawing Israel’s sprawling “urburbs” in the sand

Posted on by

Urban sprawl is not limited to the United States; a new installation in Israel looks at that country’s sprawl in the last half-century.

The State of Israel was created in 1948, with a population of around 800,000. Today, 8 million people live there—a tenfold increase that happened over the course of just a few decades. That kind of growth sparks a ravenous demand for land and housing, and in Israel has led to a housing sprawl that a group of designers, architects, and artists have coined the Urburb: neighborhoods that aren’t quite urban (they’re outside metropolitan areas) but not quite suburban (they lack the pockets of commercial businesses that define most suburbs).

To convey the notion of the Urburb, this group—comprised of architect Ori Scialom, artist Keren Yeala-Golan, designer Edith Kofsky, and professor Roy Brand—created an installation at the Israeli Pavilion for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Inside the sunlit space, guests will find four large patches of sand. Atop each is a sand printer, a machine built by the group specifically to trace blueprints, Etch-a-Sketch-style, of Israeli neighborhoods into the sand. After the sand printer has drawn one plan, it wipes the sand clean and draws another. The four printers trace city plans of Jerusalem, Holon, Hadera and Yahud, and in succession, they show how Israel’s neighborhoods became what they are today…

This wasn’t by design. In 1951, when the nation was still in its infancy, a Bauhaus-trained architect named Arieh Sharon created a housing plan for Israel that advocated a dispersed approach to development. Unfortunately for Sharon, people gravitated towards the coast, Israel saw an influx of immigrants, and the plan didn’t take. Units went up quickly to accommodate a booming population, without much regard to architectural integrity. (Yeala-Golan describes the residences as “cookie-cutter houses.”)

Lousy aesthetics aside, the sprawl has also created a commuter culture that’s bad for the environment: Residents have to drive into the nearest city for practically everything—groceries, schools, entertainment, and so on—since commercial properties weren’t built into the neighborhoods.

Urburb is a unique term that seems most like bedroom suburbs in the United States that are primarily about residences.

There are perhaps some parallels here to American sprawl patterns. After World War II, facing rapid population growth, both countries allowed/promoted more sprawling development. In the United States, this was often tied to millions of returning veterans who encountered housing shortages when returning from the war and in Israel it was related to immigration. “Architectural integrity,” an interesting term in itself, was not a priority as people needed housing. When looked at in hindsight, this has its drawbacks.

An interesting question to ask may be what would lead countries like the United States and Israel to promote more sprawling policies while other countries have tried to contain growing populations in more dense urban centers. In the United States, you had a combination of government support (changed mortgage rules, Interstate construction) alongside a developed frontier and individualist ideology and stirrings of sprawling growth in the booming 1920s. Other countries have much longer histories of valuing the urban center. Perhaps where this is most pertinent today is in places like China that in several decades have moved from largely rural to largely urban. What are the political and cultural dimensions of that sort of rapid change?

Another take on “Dead End: Suburban Sprawl”

Posted on by

Here is an excerpt from a new book where the author suggests suburban sprawl has reached the end of the road:

Despite the struggles of the 1970s, or perhaps because of them, sprawl moved on. It spread over wider territories. It mutated into new forms. The eye was assaulted by landscapes never seen before. Fields of McMansions sprang up in the countryside, gated communities cowered behind stucco walls, office towers were sprinkled among parking lots…

These toll lanes were quickly dubbed Lexus lanes, and they deserve the name. A study showed that drivers with incomes above $100,000 were four times more likely than those who earn less than $40,000 to have used the toll lanes on their last trip. Tolls can reach levels that seem astronomical to drivers accustomed to free interstates, yet they rarely bring in enough money to pay back the cost of construction. Most Lexus lanes need heavy subsidies.

Highways are thus segregated by economic class, much like suburban neighborhoods. Lexus lanes, by design, serve a minority—if most of the cars were in the pay lanes, the free lanes would move at the speed limit and there would be no reason to pay. The tolls are primarily an allocation mechanism, and only incidentally a source of revenue. Their purpose is to deter those less able to pay from using the new lanes. Those wealthy enough to afford the tolls bypass the traffic jams, while everyone backed up on the free lanes gets to pay the bills…

Only the tightening of land use regulation in the nimby era can explain the falloff in construction of apartment houses. Their builders face stricter zoning, growth controls, and aroused neighbors.

It would be interesting to see the unique argument of this new book because this excerpt puts together a number of the complaints about suburban sprawl that have been around for decades: roads are expensive and wasteful as regulations and taxes encouraged driving, promoting bigger single-family homes leads to more private lives marked by NIMBYism and increased consumption, and all of this led to a housing bubble and economic crisis. Perhaps the new argument – hinted at in this excerpt – is that the pace of all of this really picked up from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Sure, American suburbs existed before then but even the post-World War II exemplars, the Levittowns, had much smaller housing and were denser compared to the far-flung new waves of suburban development of recent decades.

Argument: we’ve sacrificed everything for McMansions

Posted on by

Critics of McMansions are not hard to find but Thomas Frank takes the argument further: McMansions are behind a whole host of issues including sprawl and inequality.

Of course there was something different this time around. In the 2008 collapse, the real-estate bust wasn’t the result of some larger economic trend but the cause of it. Although we are accustomed to blaming it all on subprime loans, about half of the disaster was attributable to the less-well-known fiasco in Alt-A instruments which fed the McMansion market, the “liar’s loans” which were securitized and sold off stamped with a big Triple-A. The worst recession of our lifetimes, in other words, was in large part the result of our superiors’ longing to get themselves a piece of the grandiose.

That astounding reversal of the usual chain of cause and effect changed the way I thought about the McMansion. I once believed it would be amusing to track stylistic change in the tract-mansion form—how, say, the fake French simplicity of Newt Gingrich’s 1987 McMansion gave way to the complex multigabled fakery of Michele Bachmann’s 2007 McMansion, with maybe a stop in between to contemplate Ricky Bobby’s McMansion in “Talladega Nights.”

But what I discovered is that the form doesn’t really change. Yes, the houses get bigger every year, gables and gazebos come and go, but what is really striking about the McMansion is its vapid consistency as the decades pass…

This is not some absurdity at the fringe of our way of life. This is civilization’s very center, the only thing that really makes sense in “clusterfuck nation,” the tawdry telos at which all our economic policies aim. Everything we do seems designed to make this thing possible. Cities must sprawl to accommodate its bulk, eight-lane roads must be constructed, gasoline must be kept cheap, coal must be hauled in from Wyoming on mile-long trains. Middle-class taxes must be higher to make up for the deductions given to McMansion owners, lending standards must be diluted so more suckers can purchase them, banks must be propped up, bonuses must go out, stock prices must ascend. Every one of us must work ever longer hours so that this millionaire’s folly can remain viable, can be sold successfully to the next one on the list. This stupendous, staring banality is the final outcome for which we have sacrificed everything else.

This is a strong statement: we created and generally buy into a system whose goal is to grant a privileged few the ability to live in private McMansions in nice neighborhoods. The fulfillment of the American Dream at the turn of the 21st century involves living in a McMansion. It is not just about suburbs, 0wning a car, buying cheap goods at Walmart, and sending your kids to nice schools; it is about having the glitzy, architecturally-dubious but spacious home.

What I don’t see in Frank’s piece is how exactly the dots connect. The number of McMansions are still relatively limited due to their cost. Not all gated communities have McMansions. Not all suburbs are edge cities or vacuous tract neighborhoods like the ones highlighted in Suburban Nation. I’d like to see the data where half of the housing bubble of the late 2000s was due to loans for McMansions. In other words, this may be a populist argument today given the status of McMansions but the true story is likely more complicated.

More sprawl = more Republicans

Posted on by

Richard Florida summarizes research that shows cities with more sprawl have more Republicans:

Hickory, a small industrial city in western North Carolina, lies within the state’s 10th congressional district, one that the Washington Post has called “one of the most Republican in the nation.” Its representative, Congressman Patrick McHenry, proudly boasts that, on family values issues, he is tied for the “most conservative voting record in Congress.”

Last week, Hickory topped another list. Researchers at Smart Growth America named the metro it anchors (Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, population 350,000) the most sprawling in the country (PDF). At the other extreme, the metros topping the list of “most compact” are also some of the country’s true blue strongholds, with New York and San Francisco ranking as the two most “compact metros” in America.

These two sets of metros reflect a more pervasive pattern. In recent decades, America’s politics have exhibited a new trend, where Red America finds its home base in some of the country’s most sprawling places, while Blue America is centered in denser, more compact metros and cities…

Researchers have identified a tipping point of roughly 800 people per square mile where counties shift from Red to Blue, as I noted in the weeks following Barack Obama’s reelection. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse similarly explained this spatial link between a spread-out landscape and Republican political positions to the New Republic. “There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good,” he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially.”

While I’m not sure Florida’s correlations that are strong, his arguments are in line with other researchers who have uncovered this pattern in recent decades. But, the data could be even more fine-grained than just comparing metro areas (which have varying degrees of sprawl within them): dense cities are more Democrat, exurbs are more Republican, and the parties are fighting over middle-suburb residents, places that may have been more traditional suburbs but have recently experienced more demographic and economic change.