The ever bullish on sprawl Professor Wendell Cox likes to write articles that call out those urban areas which have enacted policies to encourage density and reduce sprawl. A recent example is his piece The Infrastructure Canard where he unpacks the popular notion that private developers never really pay their way in terms of infrastructure costs. The cost of providing infrastructure for far-flung developments is in fact often held up as a reason why infill development would be more cost effective. And Cox makes a few good points.
The fact is, suburban developers frequently put in all the infrastructure of their subdivisions during the initial construction phase. Today they are also often required to pay impact fees on top of that, and they are required to set aside land for parks, open spaces, and schools. Debunking myths like these is a great service and I for one am thankful that Cox bothers to do it. Which makes it all the more infuriating when he trots out his own canards, usually invoking the word “Portland” or sometimes “Seattle” or “California” to do it, that slag on dense, urban development as driving up housing costs in those areas that try it – while at the same time creating greater traffic problems and worse air pollution.
Given my 13 years of up close and personal experience with Seattle, whenever I read this kind of boneheaded nonsense, it’s always galling. So I’d like to rebut Cox’s claim that:
Destroying Housing Affordability in the United States: In the United States, compact development polices have also increased house prices. For example, even after hitting bottom earlier this year, house prices in compact development markets such as California, Seattle and Portland remained as much as twice as expensive related to income than in less strongly regulated markets. The annual US infrastructure savings suggested in the Costs of Sprawl – 2000 are so small that they would pay less than one-third of the excess higher annual mortgage payments in California attributable to compact development (Note).
In Seattle, within city limits and within the central Puget Sound region including Seattle’s immediate suburbs, the problem that is causing higher prices is not the policies having to do with reducing sprawl. The Seattle-Tacoma-Everett metropolitan area, home to some 4 million souls, sprawls for over 60 miles along the I-5 corridor – and sprawls for up to 20 miles eastward along various east-west highway corridors such as I-90 and SR-520.
Within this 1200 square mile metropolitan area, a variety of housing at a variety of price points can be found, suitable to just about any income. Location, however, is a different matter entirely.
In a market, price is determined by the two competing factors, supply and demand. The City of Seattle is about as landlocked as any city, being surrounded on nearly all sides by water. Seattle is expensive because it is desirable. For every expensive charming old house in a charming old neighborhood in Seattle, there are 5 houses 30 to 40 miles out of town selling for way less. In an affluent area that makes its money on education, medical research, software development, and aircraft manufacture, it can be fairly easily shown that people who can choose based on factors other than price will choose what they desire – and old houses in old neighborhoods are desirable.
All things being equal, this would be an acceptable solution. However, the only way in and out of most of the affordable places is via the private automobile. Far from being an anti-automobile missive, this piece serves to remind that the history of auto-oriented development makes a pretty compelling case that as more lanes are added, more traffic congestion will emerge to fill those additional lanes. There is a physical limit to the number of vehicles which can be moved per hour per mile of a highway lane. Most people who drive are not driving with the intent of optimizing traffic flow, they are in a hurry and want others to get out of their way. Gridlock is the natural result.
The reward awaiting those who shop based on price and square footage, is a legendarily long commute of hours a day wasted fuming inside an individual climate controlled box on wheels. Were the level of subsidy for effective high capacity mass transit anywhere near equal that of highways in the Seattle area, these long commutes would be made via transit. People would still own cars. They would use the right tool for the job, as far as their transportation choices are concerned. It is the regional infrastructure that suffers from suburban development, not the infrastructure of an individual development. As people drive 30 and 40 miles one way, twice a day, 5 days a week, they impact the infrastructure of the areas they drive through – infrastructure they are not paying for.
While no fan of sprawl as a phenomenon, I have accepted that population growth and constraints on supply of more desirable in-city housing will always lead to sprawl, no matter what efforts are undertaken by governments to control it. As the owner of a detached single family residence, I can attest to the fact that people like houses. But house prices in old city neighborhoods are higher relative to their suburban counterparts due to desirability. That hardly any developer is making new grid system towns which have the characteristics that will evolve into desirable old city neighborhoods over time is what is driving up prices in many metro areas.
Are urban growth boundaries the answer to the problem of sprawl? The jury is still out on that one, but probably not. By the same token, neither is limitless sprawl the solution to expensive housing in more desirable neighborhoods. Sprawl that genuinely mimics the character and form of the desirable neighborhoods, and is connected to major destinations by effective transit, would seem to be the solution.
Cox is using red herrings to convince us that people actually want what is on offer from suburban developments. A closer analysis will reveal that when people can choose based on factors that are important to them, the situation is not so cut and dried. The reality of the situation is that people are taking what they can get – not necessarily what they want.
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