The Conversation

I'm not laughing. Really, I'm not:

Since real-estate tanked, many new planned communities across the country are half-empty, with for-sale signs outnumbering residents by a large margin.

Some of the projects abandoned by bankrupt developers are in places that were hotbeds of new housing construction: Southern California, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix. As of July, the percentage of vacant housing stock available for sale or rent stood at 4.8% nationally, the highest figure in at least 33 years, according to Zelman & Associates, a real-estate research firm.

Daily life in these developments seems a bit post-cataclysmic. Children play on elaborate but empty playgrounds. They walk their dogs past rows of shiny houses that have never been lived in. Voices echo up and down the block. Unfinished houses and vacant lots strewn with construction debris clutter the horizon. (link)

Labels: Sprawl

Smarter people than I have already weighed in on how ill-advised it would be to suspend the federal gasoline tax, as John McCain has proposed. Let me add my own voice nonetheless: This is a really, really, stupid idea. Our so-called leaders should be telling us to consume less fuel, not giving us license to use more. (Not to mention the loss of funds for road and bridge repair.)

And I'm not letting the Democratic candidates off the hook. They can spar all they want over oil company profits, or who did or didn't vote for the Bush administration energy proposal, but I don't hear either one of them giving the hard truth to the American people: The age of cheap energy is gone, probably for good, and neither technology nor alternative fuels will save us unless we make fundamental changes in the way we live.

Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, energy, gasoline tax, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sprawl

A blogger at the Chronicle of Higher Education says that technology can't save us from our addiction to cheap oil:

Better solar panels, improved insulation, and more miles per gallon are attainable if we want them; the lab wizards can be counted on to provide them.

The real problem is that the energy crisis is mainly in our heads — in our habits and comfort preferences. (link)

That's why it drives me nuts to hear politicians -- including those I support, like Barack Obama -- complain about oil companies' "windfall profits." If we stop driving so damn much (says the Brookline resident who works in Moon), then maybe those gas prices will go down.

Labels: energy, Sprawl

Mike Madison discusses a Cato Institute critique of Portland's growth restrictions. Some time ago at my other blog, I reviewed Robert Bruegmann's book "Sprawl: A Compact History", in which the author discusses Portland at length.

Labels: Cato Institute, Dead Tree Blog, Pittsblog, Portland, Sprawl

Anti-sprawl activist Thomas Hylton makes an argument that he's made before: Pennsylvania needs to stop subsidizing bus transportation for local school districts, a switch that he believes would encourages school districts to renovate, rather than replace, outdated school buildings:

Pennsylvania school buses travel more than 381 million miles annually at a cost of more than $1 billion. That's nearly 75 percent of the cost of the state's urban and rural transit authorities. Although the state provides about half the funding for both systems, school districts are automatically guaranteed a subsidy based on their aid ratio and miles traveled, no further questions asked.

For example, the Blairsville-Saltsburg School District in Indiana County recently announced plans to close its high school in Saltsburg Borough and bus those students an hour away to an enlarged Blairsville High School at an additional cost of $200,000 annually. Thanks to the state subsidy formula, district taxpayers will only pay $62,000 more. The commonwealth will make up the rest.

Generous subsidies for school busing are just one reason the number of students walking to school has plunged from 50 percent in 1970 to less than 15 percent today. In recent decades, hundreds of walkable neighborhood schools have been closed all across Pennsylvania, often to be replaced by sprawling mega-schools on the urban fringe.

These new schools spawn car-dependent development and drain the life from older communities. Statewide, the loss of neighborhood schools has been a major factor in what the Brookings Institution calls the "hollowing out" of Pennsylvania -- disinvestment in older urban areas in favor of developing suburbs. ...

The Mt. Lebanon School District is held up as a model. The district has not built a new school since 1963. Instead, it has renovated its two middle schools and seven elementary schools, most dating to the 1920s and 1930s, and will soon renovate its 1928 high school. The district's architect estimates the renovated schools cost about 70 percent of the price of new construction, not including land acquisition. (link)

On the whole, I agree with Hylton. By subsidizing school bus transit, without any conditions, the state is, in effect, subsidizing sprawl. Undoubtedly some districts would find it more affordable to rehab smaller neighborhood schools rather than build large new ones if they had to bear the entire cost of transportation.

But I think in some cases Hylton may be confusing cause and effect. Some school districts build large, consolidated schools because a decline in the school-age population makes the cost of maintaining several buildings prohibitive. It's not merely a question of whether renovation is cheaper than new construction, but whether the costs of renovation and ongoing maintenance of multiple buildings is offset by savings in transportation.

Mt. Lebanon can maintain its neighborhood schools because it has a relatively stable, dense population -- not to mention a healthy tax base. Those are luxuries that not every community enjoys.

Labels: public education, Sprawl

I find an excuse to talk about sprawl over at my book blog.

Labels: Dead Tree Blog, Sprawl

It turns out that America's freeway capital is trying to build one of the nation's best public transportation systems:

Los Angeles is No. 2 in the nation in bus ridership and No. 3 in light rail, according to industry statistics. Since 1993, it and Detroit are the only major metropolitan regions in the nation that have succeeded in lowering the annual hours of delay per traveler. In October, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) named Los Angeles County's Mass Transportation Authority the best public transportation system in the country -- truly a man-bites-dog turnaround for an agency that for years was known for incompetence and shady deals. Other cities interested in expanding their public transit systems, notably Atlanta and Tampa, are even studying Los Angeles.

Critics have long regarded Los Angeles as the epitome of suburban sprawl, a city with no true center that is clogged with traffic and pollution. But Los Angeles is the nation's densest urban region, and it makes me realize that advocates of high-density development and public transit like yours truly) have probably confused cause and effect: Excellent public transit systems do not necessarily lead to high-density communities. (Because people cannot be forced to use transit. Besides, many of the earliest suburbs grew up around commuter railroad stations.) Rather, as communities grow denser, residents will demand high-quality public transit.

Labels: Los Angeles, public transportation, Sprawl

James Howard Kunstler weighs in on Robert Bruegmann's "Sprawl" with this review. If you're familiar with the book, and familiar with Kunstler, you won't be surprised to learn that Kunstler hates the book as much as he hates the phenomenon its title describes:

Despite his boatloads of statistics, Bruegmann is just flat-out wrong in many of his positions and virtually all of his conclusions. At the center of his thesis is the unquestioned assumption that the suburban project can continue indefinitely, that it is a good thing, that we will get more of it, and we ought to stop carping and enjoy it. His book fails entirely to acknowledge the fact that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis that will put an end to the drive-in utopia whether people like it or not. This singular harsh fact obviates all the rationalizations brought to the quixotic defense of suburbia.

I hope to write about Bruegmann's book soon at my other blog, but for now I'll say this: While Kunstler scores some points in his review (and takes some typical cheap shots), he confirms one of the Bruegmann's central points, which is that much of the criticism of sprawl is based on subjective, aesthetic judgments made by people who scorn the choices freely made by their fellow citizens. (And I say that as someone who regularly criticizes those choices myself.) Kunstler's review is a good example of how two people can look at the same set of facts and come to radically different conclusions.

Labels: book reviews, James Howard Kunstler, Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl