'New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City

It’s about control—using infrastructure to make the masses conform to one vision of how to live."

By 

Christopher F. Rufo

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ILLUSTRATION: CHAD CROWE

America’s big cities are almost all dominated by the Democratic Party, but the politics of urban development are far from monolithic. In the past few years, a new faction has emerged across the country. Call them the new left urbanists.

These activists have big dreams. They want local governments to rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads and tolls—to achieve social justice, racial justice and net-zero carbon emissions. They rally around slogans such as “ban all cars,” “raze the suburbs” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—though they’re generally white and affluent themselves, often employed in public or semipublic roles in urban planning, housing development and social advocacy. They treat public housing, mass transit and bike lanes as a holy trinity, and they want to impose their religion on you.

“The residential is political,” wrote new left urbanists David Madden and Peter Marcuse in 2016. “The shape of the housing system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and classes.” By dictating how cities build new housing, the logic goes, urbanists can dictate how people live and set right society’s socioeconomic, racial and moral deficiencies.

One widely circulated left-urbanist plan from April 2018 comes from the People’s Policy Project, a crowdfunded socialist think tank. The authors, Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper, envision the construction of 10 million “municipal homes” over the next decade. The proposal imagines local governments building more housing units than the private construction industry and becoming the largest landlord in many cities.

The abysmal record of public housing in the U.S., from crime to decay, makes no difference to these urbanists. They rebrand “housing projects” as “municipal homes” and assert that new units will resemble neighborhoods in Stockholm, Vienna and Helsinki, rather than Detroit, Newark and Oakland.

Activists are concerned not only with the quantity of new housing but also with who builds and lives in it. New developments must be government-run and tick off the boxes of identity politics. In San Francisco, some activists oppose all private housing construction. A 2017 essay in the San Francisco Examiner called advocates for more market housing part of a “libertarian, anti-poor campaign to turn longtime sites of progressive organizing into rich-people-only zones” and compared them to white nationalists.

One might dismiss this as radical posturing, but public-housing advocates have seized real power in city halls. They’ve learned how to use the zoning and permitting bureaucracy to stanch private development. In San Francisco’s Mission District, laundromat owner Bob Tillman had to spend $1.4 million and nearly five years to gain permission to convert his business into an apartment building. Activists and their enablers in City Hall claimed the laundry business was “historic” and that development would displace minority residents. At one point the planning commission hired a “shadow consultant” to assess whether the shadows cast by the proposed building could cause harm to the community.

In New York City, progressive urbanists have focused on public transportation. The subway system was designed mostly in the early 20th century to serve the practical needs of New Yorkers, but today’s activists see it as a grand instrument for cosmic justice.

In the Straphangers Campaign’s 2018 “Transportation and Equity” report, the advocacy group begins from the premise that “the most vulnerable New Yorkers suffer disproportionately from high fares, long commutes, polluted air, and dangerous streets.” It ends up estimating that an additional $30 billion in tax revenue would be needed for its desired overhaul: upgrading 11 subway lines, building 130 new accessible stations, and purchasing more than 3,000 new subway cars, along with nearly 5,000 new buses, over the next 10 years.

While state and local leaders haven’t signed up for this ambitious plan, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio and other local politicians have expressed support for some of the activists’ funding proposals, including congestion pricing, a “millionaire’s tax,” a marijuana tax, a stock-transfer tax and even a $3-a-package tax on Amazon deliveries.

There’s a reasonable argument for congestion pricing in traffic-glutted Manhattan and for more investment in mass transit. But the Straphangers’ long-term vision involves elimination of the automobile, which remains a middle-class staple in the outer boroughs. Their plan would restrict curbside space for cars by building “protected bike lanes on all major arterial streets across the five boroughs,” “giving developers incentives to contribute toward sustainable transportation over private vehicle usage,” and eliminating parking requirements for new housing.

Activists use euphemisms like “transportation alternatives” and “transportation choices,” but at heart their vision is about control. They want to remake the urban infrastructure in their own image: green, moral and in solidarity with the masses—at least as those masses exist in their imagination.

The new left urbanists’ fatal mistake is to view cities as collections of buildings, roads, tunnels and bike lanes. Urbanists can demolish and rebuild physical environments, but they can’t pave over the people. Life in a metropolis is simply too complex, too variable and too ephemeral—it will evade even the most careful planning. Making cities better and more beautiful requires bringing neighbors, developers, employers and governments into the conversation. Thriving cities are built through cooperation, not compulsion.

Mr. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose Summer issue this is adapted.

The New Shame of Our Cities

The New Shame of Our Cities

by Joel Kotkin

A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens. . . . Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it.

                        —Jane Jacobs

Perhaps no song has been belted out more often than the one that claims that America is moving “back to the city.” Newspapers, notably the New York Times, devote enormous space to this notion. It gained even more currency when the Obama administration sec­retary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Do­novan, pro­claimed that the suburbs were “over” as people were “voting with their feet” and moving to dense, transit-oriented urban centers.

This celebration perhaps reached its crescendo when Amazon initially announced its move to Crystal City, Virginia, and Queens, New York. “Big cities won Amazon and everything else,” Neil Ir­win of the Times predictably enthused. “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of re­cruiting superstar employees.”

In fact, however, these views are more aspirational, or even delusional, than reflective of reality. Overall, data suggests that we are not seeing a great “return to the city” but, with few exceptions, a continued movement out to the suburbs and less dense cities, nota­bly in the sunbelt. The spurt of urban core growth that occurred immediately after the housing bust turned out to be remarkably short lived, with the preponderance of metropolitan growth—roughly 80 percent—returning, as has been the case since at least the late 1940s, to the suburbs and exurbs. Indeed, at no point did Census Bureau estimates show net domestic migration from suburbs to core cities, only a reduced rate of migration in the opposite direction. 

Even the country’s most influential urbanist, scholar Richard Florida, now suggests that the great urban revival is “over.” Rather than the usual belief that density leads to productivity and innovation, a new Harvard study demonstrates that, between 1970 and 2010, suburban areas have overall steadily increased their economic advantages: the share of suburbs making up the top ranks of all urban and suburban neighborhoods (measured as the top quartile) went from roughly two-thirds in 1970 to almost three-quarters by 2010.

Shifting Demographics:
Exaggerating the Urban Renaissance

Even at the peak of the urban “renaissance,” most of the population and job growth continued to occur in the suburban periphery. Cities achieved some parity in growth rates in the period between 2009 and 2011, as presidents Bush and Obama provided “a covert bailout”  to banks, universities, and government bureaucracies concentrated heavily in and around urban cores.

Yet as the rest of the economy improved, and urban land prices rose, population movement again shifted away from the dense inner city to less compact, more affordable locales. Analysis of census data by demographer Wendell Cox found that the core counties of the metropolitan areas with populations of more than one mil­lion, after losing only ten thousand net domestic migrants in 2012, experienced an outflow of nearly 440,000 by 2017.

This has occurred even in the most exemplary “creative class” cities. In New York, a city coterminous with five counties, the net domestic migration loss has been 1.1 million since 2010; and much of this is to surrounding suburbs, which account for five of the top seven destination counties in the nation for fleeing Gothamites. New York’s borough of Brooklyn, the acclaimed epicenter of early twenty-first-century urban dynamism, lost population in 2017 and 2018. In fact, in 2018, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago all lost residents to the rest of the country. Net domestic migration has also plummeted in San Francisco by 80 percent since the early 2010s. The key here has been surging housing prices, which eat up much of the big-city wage premium that many boosters focus on.

Critically, this trend has taken hold among the generation that many predicted would sustain the urban “renaissance”: millennials.  In fact, as a new Brookings study shows, millennials are not moving en masse to large, dense cities but away from them. According to demographer Bill Frey, the 2013–17 American Community Survey shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of postcollege millennials (ages 25–34) of any metro area—some 38,000 annually—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. New York’s losses are 75 percent higher than during the previous five-year period.

By contrast, the biggest winner is Houston, a region many plan­ners and urban theorists regard with contempt. The Bayou City gained nearly 15,000 millennials (net) last year, while other big gain­ers included Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin, which gained 12,700 and 9,000, respectively. The other top metros for millennials includ­ed Charlotte, Phoenix, and Nashville, as well as four relatively ex­pensive areas: Seattle, Denver, Portland, and Riverside–San Bernardino. The top twenty magnets include midwestern locales such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Columbus, and Kansas City, all areas where average house prices, adjusted for incomes, are at least 50 percent lower than in California, and at least one-third less than in New York.

Perhaps even more significant has been the geographic shift with­in metro areas. The media has frequently exaggerated millennial growth in the urban cores. In reality, nearly 80 percent of millennial population growth since 2010 has been in the suburbs. Even in the Bay Area, the tech industry’s global epicenter, suburban Silicon Val­ley has continued to grow its STEM base rapidly, while San Francis­co has recently seen a rapid slowdown in tech jobs. Perhaps density, massive homelessness, and filthy and disorderly streets, not to men­tion unaffordable living costs, lose their appeal as couples contemplate childbearing.

Dense, high-priced cities still attract young people straight from college, but many don’t stay long. The average resident in the down­town areas so popular with postcollege millennials has lived in the same house for approximately 2.4 years, compared with seven or more years in the suburbs and exurbs. As economist Jed Kolko has observed, the perceived “historic” shift back to the inner city has turned out to be a relatively brief phenomenon. Since 2012, suburbs and exurbs, which have seven times as many people, are again grow­ing faster than core cities. Suburbs are also seeing a strong net move­ment among educated people, those earning over $75,000, and espe­cially those between the ages of 30 and 44.

Progressive Politics, Regressive Economics

During the last decade, several urban cores—notably New York, Boston, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco—have enjoyed significant growth. Yet at the same time, as Florida notes in his New Urban Crisis (2017), this process has served to enlarge “deepening economic segregation between a prominent elite and stubborn pov­erty, as well as a shrinking middle class.”

In the past, the traditional urbanist notion, advanced by the late Jane Jacobs, maintained that cities grew best not by “luring” talent but by “creating” a middle class from its existing residents. Yet now, according to two recent Oregon studies, lower-income people in cities experience less upward mobility than people from rural areas. Indeed, according to Pew research, the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles can be found in some of the most progressive metropolitan areas, such as (in order from largest to smallest divides) San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Boston. In all these “superstar” cities, the middle-class family is rap­idly disappearing, even as poverty remains stubbornly high.

This reflects national phenomena. Research by urban analysts Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi shows that the number of high-poverty (more than 30 percent below the poverty line) neighborhoods in the United States has tripled in the last half century, from 1,100 in 1970 to 3,100 in 2010. Despite some steady growth of poverty in suburbs, the ratio of the impoverished, according to the American community survey, is still two-thirds higher in urban cores than in the suburbs. Thus recent growth in the cores seems to have done little to address poverty or inequality.

A new study by the Center for Opportunity Urbanism found that, in most cities, unbalanced urban growth has exacerbated class divisions, while doing little to address the decline of middle-class households. Philadelphia’s central core, for example, rebounded be­tween 2000 and 2014, but for every one district that gained in in­come, two suffered income declines. In 1970, half of Chicago was middle class; today, according to a new University of Illinois study, that number is down to 16 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of poor people has risen from 42 to 62 percent. Urban analyst Pete Saunders describes the city today as “one-third San Francisco and two-thirds Detroit.” 

See Full Article HERE

The great family exodus

The great family exodus

Data: IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios 

American cities are becoming more and more unfriendly to families, and new parents are fleeing for the exurbs, where housing is more affordable and schools are better.

Why it matters: In a trend that is building its own momentum, cities are increasingly dominated by wealthy, childless residents. In the future, shifting local priorities could write kids out of urban life for good.

As the chart above shows, the share of young people under 20 years old in nearly every big city in the country has fallen over the last four decades. Zooming in, a few percentage points lost here and there seem minor. But taken together, they signal a major demographic shift in urban America.

"You're seeing [declining birth rates] in the most extreme form in cities. It's a window into a larger demographic trend where kids are few and far between."

— Stephen Mihm, economic historian at the University of Georgia

Experts chalk up the exodus of families to a number of concurrent trends:

• "There's no doubt that a cluster of extraordinarily successful companies and the massive wealth that they've created has impacted housing prices," says Karen Harris, managing director of macro trends at Bain & Company. This is especially apparent in tech and finance hubs like San Francisco, New York and Boston.
• "The high cost of living makes it hard for young parents to pay for the housing and living expenses of young children of school age so they move elsewhere," Terry Clark, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.

The result: Cities are barbells, with young, affluent and single people on one end and wealthy empty-nesters on the other, says Richard Florida, a University of Toronto urban theorist. Urban populations are constantly rotating as families move out and make way for newly-minted graduates who have disposable income to spend in bars and shops — and drive gentrification.

• Even immigrants, who used to populate cities, are moving straight to suburbs where homes are cheaper and schools are better, Florida says.

The big picture: "Historically, cities have a hard time surviving, and much less thriving, if they must constantly replenish their populations from outside," Mihm tells Axios.

• Big, vibrant hubs like San Francisco, Chicago or New York might not have difficulty luring scores of young people every year.
• But smaller cities like Hartford, Cleveland, Detroit and Rochester, which are too expensive for families andhave a hard time attracting young talent suffer.
• These four cities have seen the sharpest declines in kid population in recent years.

And if the most visible, most successful residents of cities are rich, single, young people, "schools, playgrounds and other amenities may not be funded with quite the same enthusiasm," says Mihm.

The other side: The kids haven't disappeared completely, but the families that do stay in cities are typically those that have the money to buy large homes and pay for private schools. "It's not that there aren't children in cities, it's that they're rich," says Harris."In fact, we've seen real renewals of cities with parks and museums and green spaces, but for the rich."

For the New Urban Density Hawks, Community Character is Not an Option

For the New Urban Density Hawks, Community Character is Not an Option

JOHN MIRISCH 10 MAY 2018


GUEST WORDS--Urban planning exists to serve people and communities, not the other way around. Unfortunately, urban planners these days, perhaps under the influence of academic arrogance as well as the lure of developer dollars, seem to forget this simple truism.

A particularly invidious form of planning orthodoxy involves certain adherents of so-called “new urbanism,” which looks at density, more density and only density as the hallmark of the (for them) only acceptable form of urban living.

Without considering that people of all colors, stripes and ethnicities might like to have gardens, these urban planning densifiers support policies whose main aims are to eliminate low-density housing, without regard to preservation of the integrity of communities or without acknowledging that community character means anything.

The new urbanist density hawks also use other “arguments” apart from social justice to make their moral case for high-density, including, importantly, environmental considerations. Never mind the fact that even studiesdone by density advocates show that the supposed benefits of increased density on the environment would be marginal, at best. But that doesn’t dampen the rhetoric. Far from it. Some of the most strident density fetishists decrysingle-family neighborhoods as “the enemy” and proclaim homeowners to be nothing less than “zoo animals” and “bloodthirsty dinosaurs,” who are “angry, entitled, immoral, classist and racist.”

While new urbanist Yimbys make claims that low-density housing is immoral for numerous reasons, many social justice groups and environmental groups take issue with policies they aggressively (and sometimes obnoxiously) push, such as California state senator Scott Wiener’s SB827, which would have used public transportation as an alibi to allow developers to densify cities by pre-empting municipalities’ general plans.

While Yimbys are evidently great at chanting, they aren’t as skillful in appreciating the irony of their dehumanizing policy goals. The contradictions and outright hypocrisy in their density fetishism is sometimes so extreme, that the cognitive dissonance should cause heads to explode. The density fetishists can’t seem to help treating people like widgets, stats or marks. They don’t seem to understand that communities are made up of people. They can’t recognize that communities are dynamic extensions of people, that they are extensions of families – however one chooses to define “family.”

Some of the most strident pro-density new urbanists and Yimbys are militant about their own personal right of self-definition, as they well should be. Whether it is a matter of how one defines “family,” LGBTQ rights, religious beliefs, ethnicity or any other seemingly trivial or crucial personal characteristic that helps people to define themselves, the right of self-definition is paramount when it comes to people’s abilities to unfold their own unique potential and to live a fulfilled life.

So is it with communities. But such self-definition for individuals and communities demands respect and tolerance, two qualities seemingly in short supply with the Yimbys and academic master planners.

Cities in many ways are like human beings themselves. Communities made up of living, breathing humans need the same right of self-definition as individuals. Like people, communities have their own unique character, their own DNA, their own aspirations which arise from the individuals who make them up.

Urban humanism, in direct opposition to new urbanist Yimbyism’s cult-like intolerance, respects that communities are made up of dynamic people and that one-size-fits-all mandates aren’t suitable for them any more than imposing a single definition of “family” would be for the individuals that make up these communities.



Density fetishism itself negates the notion that while ultra-dense urban living may be a lifestyle choice for some individuals (a choice which might, incidentally, change as people get older), so is the desire to live within a human-scale, low-rise community. Both choices are legitimate, as is everything else in between.

Yet in their unflinching dogmatism, new urbanist Yimbys seem unwilling to dispense the kind of tolerance they take for granted when it comes to many of their own personal lifestyles. The unwillingness to recognize and respect the uniqueness of communities can have a similar effect as the unwillingness to recognize and respect the uniqueness of individual people.

The new urbanist de-humanizing view towards cities and communities often tends to repeat the misguided narrative that cities themselves are to blame for the housing crisis in California. While CEQA needs to be fixedto ensure that cities don’t act irresponsibly, the Yimby blame-game towards cities doesn’t take into account Sacramento’s role in pushing cities to prioritize commercial development above housing, including abolishing re-development agencies.

New urbanist Yimbys would rather blame cities than look at the issue of income inequality or the role corporations play in having created the housing crisis. Tech CEO’s brag about their “insane margins,” and the Yimbys just harrumph and glibly move on to their next pro-density rant. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so surprising, considering that the Astro-Turf Yimby groups are largely funded by Silicon Valley tech billionaires, including Trump-buddy Peter Thiel.

Urban humanism, in direct contrast to new urbanist Yimbism, understands that corporations are not people and that money is not speech. Urban humanism, which favors a bottom-up approach as opposed to the top-down approach favored by new urbanist Yimbys, puts communities over corporations, people over profits and does not try to make political hay out of housing policy.

Strangely enough, the new urbanist Yimbys fail to see the contradictions resulting from their ideological alignment with corporate interests. Self-defined “progressive” Democrats find themselves spouting the Reaganomic trickle-down theories of Laffer and Mundell, as well as defining “property rights” in a way which, glossing over income inequality, would make hardliner objectivists nod their heads in agreement. Instead, they choose to focus on what they perceive to be the insuperable inconsistencies of those who oppose their corporatist agenda.

In politicizing the housing crisis, density advocates suggest that there is an unnatural alliance between affluent communities and poor ones. They think, on the other hand, that there’s a natural alliance is between Yimbys and tech billionaires, corporations and developers because they “all want housing.”

True, yimbys, tech billionaires and corporations “all want housing” for reasons which would seem to be diametrically opposed to urban humanist policy. The commonality amongst these groups is the profit motive (or willingness to accept the profit motive “for the greater good”). Perhaps more importantly, low-income and affluent communities are not “unnatural allies.”

One alliance is driven by the profit motive while the other is driven by elective affinities and empathy. Communities have the capacity to understand each other at the most basic level because of the underlying human element which is at their core. It is the capacity for empathy at its most elemental: if I have a child whom I love, I should be better able to comprehend and internalize the depth of feeling of others for their own children and to bond with them because of it.

As former LA County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said:

Every member of every community cares deeply about where they live and work. Whether you live in Echo Park or Beverly Hills, in Chatsworth or Wilmington, your community is your community. Businesses, residents, and other stakeholders fight to maintain a community’s values—and its value. That doesn’t make them NIMBYs; it makes them the responsible citizen stakeholders who make a city what it is.

With all the Big Money behind their attempts at urban Gleichschaltung, the Yimbys have shown urban humanists and communitarians the pressing need to change the calculus of how policy gets set in Sacramento. With all the Big Money pushing for policies which would place profiteering over people, it’s clear we needa state government based upon the principles of subsidiarity, regional cooperation and de-centralized self-government that has the capacity to put communities over corporations.

The dual goals of livability and sustainability can best be achieved by letting communities try to develop into the best versions of themselves, as decided upon by the residents. And this means respecting the individuality of communities, instead of the Bến Tre school of urban planning, espoused by the new urbanist Yimbys who would impose their rigorous versions of density upon communities throughout the state.

Far from “destroying communities to save them,” we need to allow communities to adapt even better to the ever-changing world, while empowering them to maintain the characters which make them unique. In a world of corporate profiteering über alles, in a world in which the academic elite thinks it should be able to dictate how people live, the time has come within urban planning to stop treating human beings like widgets, stats or marks.

Urban humanism, a humanistic approach to urban planning and urban policy is an idea whose time has come. Now more than ever, it’s time to put people first. Communitarians of California, unite! You have nothing to lose but Sacramento overreach.

(John Mirisch has served on the Beverly Hills City Council since 2009 and twice served as mayor. He created the Sunshine Task Force to increase transparency in local government. John is a CityWatch contributor.)

Megacities of the Future , YIMBY Paradise?

China’s Urbanization Plans Are Going Wrong | China Uncensored

The eerie similarity of Chinese urbanization plans to Plan Bay Area and  UN Agenda's 21.

TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES: "THE ATLAS OF URBAN EXPANSION"

by Wendell Cox 09/16/2017

New York University Professor Shlomo Angel and his colleagues (Alejandro M. Blei, Jason Parent, Patrick Lamson-Hall, and Nicolás Galarza Sánchez, with Daniel L. Civco, Rachel Qian Lei, and Kevin Thom) have produced the Atlas of Urban Expansion: 2016 edition, which represents the most detailed available spatial analysis of world urbanization, relying on a sample of 200 urban areas. It was published jointly United Nations Habitat, New York University, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and released in conjunction with the Habitat III conference in Quito. The Atlasfollows the publication of Angel's Planet of Cities, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy which was reviewed in New Geography in A Planet of People: Angel's Planet of Cities.

In his Foreword, Joan Clos, Under-Secretary-General, United Nations and UN-Habitat Executive Director Joan Clos describes the Atlas findings as "quite shocking." Indeed, for urban planners and others who have been misled into believing that the cities of the world are becoming denser as they grow larger, the message of the Atlas should be a "wake-up call."

In his Foreword, Professor Angel notes that: "The anti-sprawl agenda—decrying unplanned, low density, fragmented and non-compact urban expansion—has been guiding city planners for decades and we now find that the majority of cities have adopted land use plans that seek to contain their outward expansion in one form or another." The clear message is an inconvenient truth that despite such planning, urban areas have continued to expand spatially faster than they had added population. Worldwide urban densities continue to drop virtually without regard their relative affluence or poverty.

Under-Secretary-General Clos describes the purpose of the Atlas as: "to provide informed analyses to policy makers, public officials, research administrators, and scientists for use in their decision-making processes. In this sense, the Atlas of Urban Expansion is part of the emerging ‘science of policy’ that is dedicated to the production of knowledge that best serves the public interest." Obviously, that is a laudable goal and improving cities --- which at a minimum requires both improving affluence and reducing poverty --- should design their policies to achieve these objectives.

The Atlas shows that the densities of urban areas have been dropping 1.5 percent annually over the past 25 years in more developed countries. The decline in density has been even greater, 2.1 percent, in less developed countries, which is where the vast majority of urban growth is taking place. The Atlas predicts that this trend will generally continue.

These trends are likely to continue in one form or another. Between 2015 and 2050, urban extents in more developed countries can be expected to increase by a factor of 1.9 at the current rate of increase in land consumption, by a factor of 1.5 at half the current rate, and by a factor of 1.1 if land consumption per capita remains constant over time. During this period, urban extents in less developed countries will increase by a factor of 3.7 at the current rate of increase in land consumption, by a factor of 2.5 at half the current rate, and by a factor of 1.8 if land consumption remains constant.

The Atlas has data that will not be found anywhere else, as it delves deep into the fabric of the urban area sample. There is data for each of the urban areas on each of these measures (too detailed for examination here): fragmentation, compactness, infill development and "leap frog" development.

Some of the individual urban area density trends over the past 25 years are particularly shocking. For example:

      • Guangzhou, China (which includes the urbanization of huge Foshan) is now 10 times its 1990       population, yet has experienced an urban density decline of about 75 percent.

      • Seoul has added more than a third to its population, yet its urban density has dropped by       more than 50 percent.

      • Bangkok's urban population density dropped by one-third, even as the population more than       doubled.

      • Budapest and Warsaw have seen their urban densities decline by more than 40 percent.

      • Tokyo, Paris, Tehran, and New York have experienced urban density reductions of at least 20       percent.

      • Mumbai, still the fourth highest urban density in the sample, has dropped more than 10       percent, as have Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires. Since the 1947 census, virtually all       population growth in Buenos Aires has been suburban (outside the core city of Buenos Aires).

      • Curitiba, Brazil, which has received at least as much international acclaim from urban       planners for its model policies as Portland, has seen its population density drop one third in the       last 25 years. Still, Curitiba's urban density is nearly triple that of sprawling Portland (which       ranks 189 the out of 200 in urban density, see Note 1).

One of the exceptions to the falling density "rule of thumb" is Dhaka, which the Atlas shows as having the highest density of any urban area (Note 2). Dhaka's urban density has risen three percent over the last 25 years, as much of the additional population has been housed in low-rise, unhealthful shantytowns (see: The Evolving Urban Form: Dhaka), where densities are reported to be as high as 2.5 million per square mile or 1 million per square kilometer (photograph above). This is 35 times the 70,000 per square mile density of Manhattan (27,000 per square kilometer) in 2010.

As the Atlas puts it: "When cities grow in population and wealth they expand. As cities expand, they need to convert and prepare lands for urban use. Stated as a broad policy goal, cities need adequate lands to accommodate their growing populations and these lands need to be affordable, properly serviced, and accessible to jobs to be of optimum use to their inhabitants." The concern of the Atlas is that this urban expansion be well managed.

Regrettably, this would be at considerable odds with the distortion of land markets and destruction of housing affordability (and the standard of living) associated with urban containment policy. The favored planning approach flies in the face of economic reality (See: People Rather than Places: Ends Rather than Means: LSE Economists on Urban Containmentand A Question of Values: Middle – Income Housing Affordability and Urban Containment Policy).

As The Economist has pointed out, suburbanization (pejoratively called urban sprawl) can be stopped only forcibly, "But the consequences of doing that are severe." Urban residents can only hope for a future of policies fashioned from reality rather than dogma.

Note 1: Portland's urban density lower than that of 94 of the 200 urban areas in the Atlas sample. This is nearly the same as its the ranking in Demographia World Urban Areas, where Portland's urban density is lower than that of 93 percent out of more than 1000. Demographia World Urban Areas provides population, urban land area and urban population density for the more than 1000 identified with 500,000 or more population.

Note 2: Dhaka is also shown to be the highest density urban area in Demographia World Urban Areas, which provides population, urban land area and urban population density for the more than 1000 identified with 500,000 or more population.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: In a Dhaka shantytown (by author).

PREPARING FOR THE INFINITE SUBURB

PREPARING FOR THE INFINITE SUBURB

by Joel Kotkin and Alan Berger 06/01/2017


A Q&A With Alan Berger and Joel Kotkin.

Third in a series of conversations during Infrastructure Week. See the previous Q&A with Dan Katz, Transportation Policy Counsel at Hyperloop One, and Parag Khanna, Geo-strategist and author of Connectography.

The suburbs are back. In April, New York Magazine sounded the alarm that “more and more people are fleeing New York.” Time discovered just a few weeks ago that millennials are moving to the suburbs in droves. Recent studies have shown that millennials associate homeownership with the American dream more so than Generation X or baby boomers. As the world rapidly urbanizes, suburban migration presents an opportunity to define what this growth will look like — and how it might fit in more synergistically with urban cores and rural communities.



Alan Berger (left) and Joel Kotkin (right), co-authors of Infinite Suburbia

The truth is that the suburbs never fell from favor, we just stopped noticing that they became another form of the city. The shape of suburbia is an obsession for MIT professor Alan Berger and his co-author Joel Kotkin. Alan runs the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism and teaches in the Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, while Joel is a writer and Professor of Urban Studies at Chapman University in California. Prof. Berger is also a judge for our Hyperloop One Global Challenge.

The two of them accurately highlighted this suburban resurgence long before it was popular, so we picked their brains about how they foresee emerging technology like Hyperloop playing a role in the trend. We discussed how new transportation modes might support suburban mobility and, perhaps, reshape suburbia as we know it.

H1: We hear you have an upcoming book called Infinite Suburbia. What does “Infinite Suburbia” mean?

Alan: The book’s title is meant to be polemical and measurable. Global urbanization is heading towards infinite suburbia. Around the world, the vast majority of people are moving to cities not to inhabit their centers, but to suburbanize their peripheries. Why? For many reasons, and almost always by their own choosing. Thus, when the United Nations projects the number of future “urban” residents, or when researchers quantify the amount of land that will soon be “urbanized,” these figures largely reflect the unprecedented suburban expansion of cities. By 2030, an estimated nearly half a million square miles (1.2 million square kilometers) of land worldwide will become urbanized, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the United States alone, an additional 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) of rural land will be urbanized between 2003 and 2030 . Given that these figures represent the conversion of currently rural land at the urban fringe, these lands are slated to become future, seemingly infinite suburbias.

Joel: In the United States, 69 percent of the population lives in suburbs. As late as 2010, over 75 percent of American jobs lay outside the urban core. Many other developed countries are also majority-suburban. In the global South, it is estimated that 45 percent of the 1.4 billion people who will become new urban residents will settle in peri-urban suburbs — areas where urbanized and rural areas meet . The sheer magnitude of land conversion taking place, coupled with the fact that the majority of the world’s population already lives in suburbs, demands that new attention and creative energy be devoted to the imminent suburban expansion.

Source: Past and projected rural land conversion in the US at state, regional, and national levels

H1: You point to suburbia as a truly global phenomenon. What does this say about common values across cultures?

Joel: This reflects essential human desires for personal space, contact with nature, safety and, in some cases, better educational options. Dense cities are attractive particularly to those with high incomes and those without children. When people get into their thirties, and start contemplating a family, or simply a quieter life, they usually head to suburbia.

H1: Why do the suburbs get such a bad rap?

Joel: It started early on in Britain, where suburbs offended many of the same people who are offended now — the intelligentsia, artists and gentry. Suburbs have been associated with crassness, ugliness and blamed for the decline of cities. Unlike urban cores, suburbs have few boosters; most media and major academic institutions are clustered in denser, inner city areas. Planning departments have long ignored them, or tried to figure out how to undermine them. Now, the greens are also a factor, weighing against suburban life. Simply put: everyone of consequence generally hates them, except for the vast majority of metropolitan residents who live there.

H1: What do you think earlier proponents of moving from cites got wrong, how can we harness new technology in a way that offers greater choice and sustainability?

Joel: The initial problems came from not confronting such issues as quality of life, social space and walking opportunities. Some tract suburbs provided better, often more affordable housing, but with little in the way of social amenities. Fortunately this is changing in many new developments, as can be seen in places like Woodlands and Cinco Ranch outside Houston, or Valencia and Irvine in Southern California.

Alan: My research group at MIT is currently working on a project that envisions the future of the American suburb past 2060. We have focused on the continued development of polycentricity in metropolitan areas and a tendency to expand in space as transportation technology, infrastructure, and policies allow. The framework of polycentricity will be carried forward because of spatial economics and the lowering cost of distance to affect location decisions. This future could plausibly include Level 5 autonomy (no human intervention required) for most vehicles in operation, where all driving situations can be handled by an autonomous driving system (car, truck, or all-terrain vehicle). Zero carbon emissions and Level 5 automation are absolutely in the near future, probably before Generation Z is buying cars for themselves.

Personal transportation modes will remain dominant in suburbia, but shared automobiles will transform the need for bus/rail service in suburbs. All of this assumes that consumer adoption and regulatory approval are achievable and that there is ubiquitous, reliable, and secure, low-cost wireless connectivity to the Internet-of-Things. Research suggests that level 5 autonomy will lead to 80% accident reduction.

The new spatial economics of automation will create huge environmental dividends. Reduced paving will lead to less urban flooding, less forest fragmentation, soil conservation, more groundwater recharge, and more landscape to use for common goods. Total automation will radically change the daily needs of various population segments. I can imagine increased long-distance commuting and mobile office vehicles, drone delivery for many errands, on-demand care and newly mobile elderly segments, and the elimination of drunk driving to name a few.

Conceptual view of future suburban fabric - Image Credit: Matthew Spremulli, MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism.

H1: Alan, you’re one of our esteemed judges for the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. Reviewing the applications – or engaging with teams and stakeholders at the event – what was one of the biggest surprises for you?

Alan: At a recent review of the U.S. finalist proposals in Washington D.C., I was pleasantly surprised by what I would describe as ‘regional optimism’. There was great enthusiasm and acknowledgement that we need to disrupt the broken transportation systems that are not serving emerging regional economies well. For instance, many individual cities talked about how connecting with regional partners would rejuvenate cities well beyond their own borders. There was a palpable energy to fix things and to pragmatically solve big problems that have national implications, not just local ones. It is truly rare to be in a room all day (literally 9 straight hours) with state and local agency heads from all over the U.S., the people in the day-to-day regulatory and political trenches of their cities, and hear them dream about the future in such uninhibited ways.

H1: You’re at a dinner party and a colleague proclaims Hyperloop only makes sense for intercity transport. How do you respond?

Alan: I would politely tell my colleague she needed to think about the broader applications of the infrastructure. The Hyperloop's value is exponentially greater than that of the technology itself. Like other new infrastructure, it will be joined with other innovations — 'packetized' — creating a multiplier effect. In the case of the Hyperloop, when a pod reaches its exit it will begin to function as an autonomous vehicle and completely solve the ‘last mile’ problem. The passenger will continue to ride in the same car until it reaches its final destination. What a “city” is will be redefined in the extended regional context of commuting extra long distances in short times.

H1: You’ve mentioned that even though more than 70 percent of people in the U.S. live in suburban areas —the suburbs are still growing. How can the U.S. successfully accommodate growing suburban interest and what can be done to invest in/revitalize/repurpose existing suburban infrastructure?

Joel: The key thing is to take advantage of new technologies. An overwhelming dependence on the personal car, and the ineffectiveness of rail transit (as can proved in declining market shares in many markets) — means some new approaches are necessary that are more effective and less costly. Billions have been spent on light rail and subways in dispersed urban areas like Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta but this has not increased transit share. New technologies will soon make these systems even less relevant and useful.

Alan: Joel is absolutely correct that tech innovations will change the infrastructural situation in suburbia. I think the key issue here is how we define and fund old vs. new infrastructure. There's little recognition that we need new forms of transport, and that building new infrastructure is not the same as modernizing old infrastructure. Of course, repairing bridges and helping to maintain state and national infrastructure are roles the federal government should and must continue to play. Despite that, the federal government needs to step into the future if America is going to continue to be the great transportation innovator that developed our magnificent web of trains, planes and automobile routes on a scale never seen or even imagined before.

In addition to new forms of infrastructure, government needs to re-think transportation capital. Our federal funding model is stuck in the 1950s, servicing city cores with inefficient mobility. There aren't any signs that it's going to finance the innovative infrastructure projects we need for more spread out city forms. Private investors are best positioned to understand and act on the future growth dynamics that will make these new modes succeed.

H1: Before “sprawl” became a contested word, Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for calling for more decentralization and opportunities for individuals to move away from the city. On the introduction of the automobile he wrote, man is “like a bird born in captivity, which finds the door opened. Soon he will learn that he can fly; and when he learns that he is free, he is gone.” In what ways do emerging technologies today have the power to give people greater choice to decide where to live, work, and experience leisure time?

Alan: Wright’s Broadacre City should be reimagined with a Hyperloop! But seriously, we can't sacrifice the need for environmental safeguards, or for safety and security in infrastructure. Neither should the federal government dictate things like location choice by telling people where to live. Our government has to be a partner, not an obstacle in these arenas. It should be developing streamlined, efficient, modern regulations that enable the rapid growth of new transportation technologies — technologies that are themselves key to an environmentally sustainable future. Government should refocus the federal funding apparatus, this time as an active participant in public-private partnerships — the so-called Three Ps.

Joel: The new systems, like Uber and Lyft, allow suburbanites greater flexibility at the same time the internet provides opportunity to turn the home into a primary workplace. In the future, the move towards Hyperloop technology and automated vehicles will further shatter the isolating aspects of suburban living. The beauty of suburban living — quiet, safe, allowing space — really evolves if you can strip out the maddening commute by car or even train.

This piece first appeared on the Hyperloop One blog.

Alan Berger is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he teaches courses open to the entire student body. He is founding director of P-REX lab, at MIT, a research lab focused on environmental problems caused by urbanization, including the design, remediation, and reuse of waste landscapes worldwide. He is also Co-Director of Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT (LCAU).

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.