Suburbs

Time to Rethink This Experiment? Delusion Down Under

Ross Elliott — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:38:10 -0500

The famous physicist, Albert Einstein, was noted for his powers of observation and rigorous observance of the scientific method. It was insanity, he once wrote, to repeat the same experiment over and over again, and to expect a different outcome. With that in mind, I wonder what Einstein would make of the last decade and a bit of experimentation in Queensland’s urban planning and development assessment?

Fortunately, we don’t need Einstein’s help on this one because even the most casual of observers would conclude that after more than a decade of ‘reform’ and ‘innovation’ in the fields of town planning and the regulatory assessment of development, it now costs a great deal more and takes a great deal longer to do the same thing for no measureable benefit. As experiments go, this is one we might think about abandoning or at the very least trying something different.

First, let’s quickly review the last decade or so of change in urban planning and development assessment. Up until the late 1990s, development assessment was relatively more straightforward under the Local Government (Planning and Environment) Act of 1990. Land already zoned for industrial use required only building consent to develop an industrial building. Land zoned for housing likewise required compliance with building approvals for housing. These were usually granted within a matter of weeks or (at the outset) months.

There were small head works charges, which essentially related to connection costs of services to the particular development. Town planning departments in local and state governments were fairly small in size and focussed mainly on strategic planning and land use zoning. It was the building departments that did most of the approving. Land not zoned for its intended use was subject to a process of development application (for rezoning), but here again the approach was much less convoluted that today. NIMBY’s and hard left greenies were around back then, but they weren’t in charge. Things happened, and they happened far more quickly, at lower cost to the community, than now.

In the intervening decade and a bit, we’ve seen the delivery and implementation of an avalanche of regulatory and legislative intervention. It started with the Integrated Planning Act (1997), which sought to integrate disparate approval agencies into one ‘fast track’ simplified system. It immediately slowed everything down. It promised greater freedom under an alleged ‘performance based’ assessment system, but in reality provoked local councils to invoke the ‘precautionary principle’ by submitting virtually everything to detailed development assessment. The Integrated Planning Act was followed, with much fanfare, by the Sustainable Planning Act (2009). Cynics, including some in the government at the time, dryly noted that a key performance measure of the Sustainable Planning Act was that it used the word ‘sustainable’ on almost every page.

Overlaying these regulations have been a constant flow of land use regulations in the form of regional plans, environmental plans, acid sulphate soil plans, global warming, sky-is-falling, seas-are-rising plans – plans for just about everything which also affect what can and can’t be done with individual pieces of private property.
But it wasn’t just the steady withdrawal of private property rights as state and local government agencies gradually assumed more control over permissible development on other people’s land. There was also a philosophical change on two essential fronts.

First, there was the notion that we were rapidly running out of land and desperately needed to avoid becoming a 200 kilometre wide city. Fear mongers warned of ‘LA type sprawl’ and argued the need for densification, based largely on innocuous sounding planning notions like ‘Smart Growth’ imported from places like California (population 36 million, more than 1.5 times all of Australia, and Los Angeles, population 10 million, roughly three times the population of south east Queensland). The first ‘South east Queensland Regional Plan 2005-2026’ was born with these philosophical changes in mind, setting an urban growth boundary around the region and mandating a change to higher density living (despite broad community disinterest in density). It was revisited by the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031 which formally announced that 50% of all new dwellings should be delivered via infill and density models (without much thought, clearly, for how this was to be achieved and whether anyone particularly wanted it). Then there was the South East Queensland Regional Infrastructure Plan 2010-2031 which promised $134 billion in infrastructure spending to make this all possible (without much thought to where the money might come from) and a host of state planning policies to fill in any gaps which particular interest groups or social engineers may have identified as needing to be filled.

The significant philosophical change, enforced by the regional plan, was that land for growth instantly became scarcer because planning permission would be denied in areas outside the artificially imposed land boundary. Scarcity of any product, particularly during a time of rising demand (as it was back then, when south east Queensland had a strong economy to speak of) results in rising prices. That is just what happened to any land capable of gaining development permission within the land boundary: raw land rose in price, much faster than house construction costs or wages.

The other significant philosophical change that took root was the notion of ‘user pays’ – which became a byword for buck passing the infrastructure challenge from the community at large, to new entrants, via developer levies. Local governments state-wide took to the notion of ‘developer levies’ with unseemly greed and haste. ‘Greedy developers’ could afford to pay (they argued) plus the notion of ‘user pays’ gave them some (albeit shaky) grounds for ideological justification. Soon, developers weren’t just being levied for the immediate cost of infrastructure associated with their particular development, but were being charged with the costs of community-wide infrastructure upgrades well beyond the impact of their proposal or its occupants.

Levies rose faster than Poseidon shares in the ‘70s. Soon enough, upfront per lot levies went past the $50,000 per lot mark and although recent moves to cap these per lot levies to $28,000 per dwelling have been introduced, many observers seem to think that councils are now so addicted that they’ll find alternate ways to get around the caps.

So the triple whammy of ‘reform’ in just over a decade was that regulations and complexity exploded, supply became artificially constrained to meet some deterministic view of how and where us mere citizens might be permitted to live, and costs and charges levied on new housing (and new development generally) exploded.

At no point during this period, and this has to be emphasised, can anyone honestly claim that this has achieved anything positive. It has made housing prohibitively expensive, and less responsive to market signals. Simply put, it takes longer, costs more, and is vastly more complicated than it was before, for no measureable gain.

An indication of this was given to me recently in the form of the Sunshine Coast Council’s budget for its development assessment ‘directorate.’ (How apropos is that term? It would be just as much at home in a Soviet planning bureau). Their budget (the documents had to be FOI’d) for 2009-10 financial year included a total employee costs budget of $17.4 million. For the sake of argument, let’s assume the average directorate comrade was paid $80,000 per annum. That would mean something like more than 200 staff in total. Now they might all be very busy, but it surely says something about how complexity and costs have poisoned our assessment system if the Sunshine Coast Council needs to spend over $17 million of its ratepayer’s money just to employ people to assess development applications in a down market.

If there had been any meaningful measures attached to these changes in approach over the last decade, we’d be better placed to assess how they’ve performed. But there weren’t, so let’s instead retrospectively apply some:

Is there now more certainty? No. Ask anyone. Developers are confused. The community is confused. Even regulators are confused and frequently resort to planning lawyers, which often leads to more confusion. The simple question of ‘what can be done on this piece of land’ is now much harder to answer.

Is there more efficiency? No. Any process which now takes so much longer and costs so much more cannot be argued to be efficient.

Is the system more market responsive? No. Indeed the opposite could be argued – that the system is less responsive to market signals or consumer preference. Urban planning and market preference have become gradually divorced to the point that some planners actively view the market preferences of homebuyers with contempt.

Are we getting better quality product? Many developers will argue that even on this criteria, the system has dumbed down innovation such that aesthetic, environmental or design initiatives have to fight so much harder to get through that they’re simply not worth doing.

Is infrastructure delivery more closely aligned with demand? One of the great promises of a decade of ‘reform’ was that infrastructure deficits would be addressed if urban expansion and infrastructure delivery were aligned. Well it’s been done in theory via countless reports and press releases but it’s hardly been delivered in execution. And when the volumes of infrastructure levies collected by various agencies has been examined, it’s often been found that the money’s been hoarded and not even being spent on the very things it was collected for.

Is the community better served? Maybe elements of the green movement would say so, but for young families trying to enter the housing market, the answer is an emphatic (and expensive) no. How can prohibitively expensive new housing costs be good for the community? For communities in established urban areas, there is more confusion about the impact of density planning, which has made NIMBY’s even more hostile than before.

Has it been good for the economy? South east Queensland’s economy was once driven by strong population growth – the very reason all this extra planning was considered necessary. But growth has stalled, arguably due to the very regulatory systems and pricing regimes that were designed around it. We now have some of the slowest rates of population growth in recent history and our interstate competitiveness – in terms of land prices and the costs of development – is at an all time low. That’s hardly what you’d call a positive outcome.

Is the environment better served? If you believe that the only way the environment can be better served is by choking off growth under the weight of regulation and taxation, you might say yes. But then again, studies repeatedly show that the density models proposed under current planning philosophies promote less environmentally efficient forms of housing, and can cause more congestion, than the alternate. So even if the heroic assumptions for the scale of infill and high density development contained in regional plans was actually by some miracle achieved, the environment might be worse off, not better, for it.

All up, it’s a pretty damming assessment of what’s been achieved in just over a decade. Of course the proponents of the current approach might warn that – without all this complexity, cost and frustration – Queensland would be subject to ‘runaway growth’ and a ‘return to the policies of sprawl.’ The answer to that, surely, is that everything prior to the late 1990s was delivered – successfully – without all this baggage. Life was affordable, the economy strong, growth was a positive and things were getting done. Queensland, and south east Queensland in particular, was regarded as a place with a strong future and a magnet for talent and capital. Now, that’s been lost.

Einstein would tell us to stop this experiment and try something else if we aren’t happy with the results. To persist with the current frameworks and philosophies can only mean the advocates of the status quo consider these outcomes to be acceptable. Is anyone prepared to put up their hand and say that they are?

Ross Elliott has more than 20 years experience in property and public policy. His past roles have included stints in urban economics, national and state roles with the Property Council, and in destination marketing. He has written extensively on a range of public policy issues centering around urban issues, and continues to maintain his recreational interest in public policy through ongoing contributions such as this or via his monthly blog The Pulse.

Photo by Flickr user Mansionwb

New Urbanism vs. Dispersionism

Richard Reep — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:38:14 -0500

The Florida real estate developer, unburdened of state regulatory agencies, may now focus his efforts on pleasing the investment community and the local market. I recently played the role of real estate developer interviewing two consultant teams vying to help me create a new fictional community. Fortified with readings in both the New Urbanist camp and the Dispersionist camp, each team of students pitched their method of community building to me.

The actual debate was very lively, with many rebuttals and some serious emotional engagement. The premise: I have a multi-acre greenfield property. I have shortlisted my planning candidates down to two: a New Urbanist team, and a Dispersionist team. Each team must pitch their philosophy, and I will select one team to design it.

Question 1: Since I am only able to afford Phase 1, future phases will be left to future developers. In your approach, can future generations be trusted to keep focus on high-quality development? How would you guarantee that the property rises in value? I asked the New Urbanists to go first.

The New Urbanist team was ready: As Master Planners, they will create the entire form-based vision for the property and design it around a smart code so that the future developers will obey a plan to keep property values rising. No future developer will get to ‘cheap out’. For this team, the Master Plan will guarantee a quality of life for all residents.

The Dispersionists will plan Phase 1, not as a rigid image of a town, but rather as a response to the natural landscape. This team said the community would grow organically, from its functional needs, guaranteeing the freedom of future generations to plan their own destiny. They scoffed at a Master Plan that determined the urban form. What good is a guarantee of a quality of life, they asked, if future generations want something different than the Master Planner intended?

This round, in my mind, went to the Dispersionists. Their argument that future generations should have the freedom to plan based on their functional needs outweighed the seductive beauty of a Master Plan. Too many Master Plans are implemented poorly, or abandoned due to their disutility based on changing needs and markets.

Question 2: How does your viewpoint deal with the car? How will residents and visitors get around your community? I asked the Dispersionists to go first this time.

“Well,” replied the Dispersionists, “Americans love their cars, and we love the car too. We’ll plan for sidewalks and bikes, but we know that the car is a necessity. We know that a 5-minute walk isn’t so realistic in Florida’s hot, humid climate.” The Dispersionists have a hearty regard for cars, and they spoke of long, sweeping curves and scenic drives. They pointed out that most residents will need to drive to other parts of the city as well.

The New Urbanists shuddered. “We will plan for car-free living,” they stated. With very clever planning, they intended to keep driving to a minimum, and will design walking trails. One New Urbanist ventured 4-story parking garages, crowing that their proposal would not be littered with gas stations. The New Urbanists pointed out the ugly commercial strips dominating our current city, and how little they want that to intrude into the new development.

I liked this, and challenged the Dispersionists. Isn’t it better health, and less use of oil, to reduce vehicle dependency? The Dispersionists asked me why, in this ten-acre community, I thought I could attract residents with 4-story parking garages? Good point, I thought.

Both sides had good answers, and the question did not fully go to one side or the other. Cars do tend to generate a lot of aesthetic horror. On the other hand, they are not going away anytime soon, so learning how to deal with them seems like an important task for a developer looking to the future.

Question 3: How would you distribute density in your development? One center, multiple centers, and centered around what? This time the New Urbanists went first.

The core, they stated, will be in the center of town, and could go to 8-10 stories, leaving the perimeter a green zone. In the center will be the government and institutional buildings, carefully matched with proper style. The point, they said, is predictability. They pledged to learn from the failures of the past, and their Master Plan will account for the full scope of development.

The Dispersionists suggested multiple centers. “Phase 1 will be our first density cluster,” they said, “and we’ll see how it goes.” Unlike the New Urbanists, they didn’t want to introduce all their product at once, in case the market changes. “We believe in New England-style green space,” they said, and wanted to evolve the community around these. They saw the vitality of the community coming from diversity.

I asked the New Urbanists what they would do if the market changes . When pressed, they insisted their Master Plan had plenty of contingency plans in case the original plan wasn’t workable, but it sounded like they were winging it.

This is what the Dispersionists saw as their own strong suit. “We don’t have all the answers,” they said. Their first phase would gently nudge the community in a certain direction, but it would leave future developers the choice whether to reinforce the first phase, or strike out and build another phase better suited to a unique need.

I felt that this round went to the Dispersionists.

Question 4: Do you think your development scheme can promote or discourage social values? Why or why not? This time the Dispersionists went first.

The Dispersionists believed that one cannot engineer social values through urban design. However, they can be influenced. Conservation, for example, is a value that they would promote in their plan to conserve open space and not overtake the land with development. A sense of community, they said, was another, giving people a loyalty to their community out of good design. These, they felt, led to a sustainable plan.

The New Urbanists guaranteed that conservation land would always be there, and pointed out the Dispersionists’ flexibility as a negative . The New Urbanists insisted that their sense of place would be stronger, because it would be designed. People want predictability. New Urbanists would engage people by walking and having front porches.

The Dispersionists speculated that neighbors will get to know one another in a cul-de-sac just as well as they would if they all had front porches. They also felt that the shared experiences of a community would transcend the particular style or form that community took.

Although I gave this one to the New Urbanists, I was skeptical about the New Urbanists’ implication that well-behaved buildings produce well-behaved people. The Dispersionists’ view that a cul-de-sac breeds any neighborly closeness also seemed a bit disingenuous. It was near the end of class.

Question 5: Give me your arguments why your strategy is sustainable. I let the New Urbanists go first.

For one thing, they said, they will have more efficient transportation. Vertical buildings save land, they argued, and people who choose this community will value open space more highly and be willing to live densely. They believed that they will have less gridlock by de-emphasizing the car and will be more stable and socially cohesive. All this will come from a well-designed Master Plan.

The Dispersionists said their community would start small and then grow. Failures won’t cause dead zones, they claimed, because they are not sentimental about form and want a community that works. So if a building in their development begets a failed business, the building will need to be reinvented to make it successful.

“Yes, but,” countered the New Urbanists, “for every successful community like yours, there are 10 that have failed and ultimately decline in value. What guarantee do you give that you will be the one out of ten?” They went on to cite their successes – Seaside, Celebration, and so on.

The Dispersionists noted that Seaside was a resort town and Celebration was heavily subsidized by a local employer, so those weren’t exactly good models. In any case, they said, their community will appeal to a much broader segment of the population than the New Urbanists, and therefore more likely to sustain growth in the future.

With that, the debate was concluded. What lingers, however, are some truths that show both sides need to do some more work.

The New Urbanists, fresh on the scene, seem overly evangelical in their approach, and demand a great deal of faith in the Master (Planner). The slow, organically grown towns of which they are so fond were largely planned before the car. While many of these towns, like Charleston, South Carolina, are sentimental favorites, their practical replication in today’s transportation-intensive, constantly changing real estate market is questionable.

The Dispersionists, on the other hand, have been around for quite a long time, and are the modus operandi for much of the earth’s population. They seem uninvolved in the aesthetics of the built environment, preferring to leave this up to individual taste, and the result is a rather shabby, cluttered contemporary American scene. Some cleaning up is certainly in order.

While the New Urbanists have a hopeful approach in this regard, they are overreacting to the vast consumer-oriented real estate development world that operated up until 2007, and are missing the fundamentals of how a real community works. None are built around employers or economic producers in any significant way. None admit the lowest socioeconomic groups. Content, perhaps, to dabble with shopping districts and farmer’s markets, New Urbanists have yet to offer what contemporary employers need – space, flexibility, and room to grow. They therefore seem doomed to create peripheral urban designs rather than communities integrated with 21st century employers.

Dispersionists would do well to pay a bit more attention to the natural environment, for the general public is quite aware of the toll that this strategy has taken. Developers, having overbuilt in so many markets recently, will face tough opposition to bulldozing another woodland, given the empty real estate that exists in our cities today.

It seems inevitable that dispersionist strategies will continue; they largely dominate our real estate development world and will continue to do so. They make the most economic sense, they leave the future choices to the future generations, and they respond to people’s natural density tendencies. One hopes that the New Urbanists will nudge the market a bit more towards aesthetic continuity and environmental stewardship as the next wave of growth inevitably begins again, and that the debate remains healthy, productive, and positive as citizens get re-engaged about the future of their cities.

Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

The Evolving Urban Form: Guangzhou-Foshan

Wendell Cox — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:38:16 -0500

The Pearl River Delta of China is home to the largest extent of continuous urbanization in the world. The Pearl River Delta has 55 million people in the jurisdictions of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, Zhuhai and Macau. Moreover, the urban population is confined to barely 10 percent of the land area. These urban areas are the largest export engine of China and reflect the successful legacy of Deng Xiaoping's reforms which had their start with the special economic zone in Shenzhen and spread to the rest of the Delta and then much of the nation.

Adjacent Metropolitan Areas: However, the Pearl River Delta today is not a metropolitan area, as is often asserted. Instead it is rather a collection of adjacent metropolitan areas or labor markets (Figure 1). Metropolitan areas are not created by a large number of people living close to one another. Metropolitan areas are labor markets, crudely delineating the geography of the jobs-housing balance. There is little commuting between the Pearl River jurisdictions. Moreover, as labor markets, metropolitan areas cannot be international unless there is virtual free movement of labor (Note). In the case of Hong Kong and Macau, commuting between the neighboring jurisdictions of Shenzhen and Zhuhai requires crossing the equivalent of an international border.

Integrating Guangzhou and Foshan: Transportation integration has already come to two of the jurisdictions, Guangzhou and Foshan. The adjacent prefectures (confusingly interpreted into English as "cities") are now linked by a subway and unlike the other Pearl River Delta jurisdictions, the continuous urbanization does not narrow at the border (Figure 1). There are even proposals to merge the adjacent prefectures.

Guangzhou and Foshan are separated by a tributary of the Pearl River, with a number of bridges that provide similar crossing capacity as exists in cross-river metropolitan areas like Portland (Willamette River), Cincinnati (Ohio River) and St. Louis (Mississippi River).

Guangzhou itself is the capital of Guangdong, the largest province of China, with approximately 105 million people. Guangdong is the third largest state or province (sub-national jurisdiction) in the world, trailing the states of Uttar Pradesh (contains the eastern suburbs of Delhi) and Maharashtra (capital Mumbai) in India.

Guangzhou is larger than Foshan. It is better known to many Westerners as Canton, and for many years served as China’s “window” on the west. Even in China, the alternative name is still used, for example in the annual Canton Fair, one of the largest trade fairs in the world.

Canton was also a principal flashpoint of 19th century hostilities between the British and Chinese. The First Opium War (1839-42) began at Canton and led to the cession of Hong Kong to Great Britain and the establishment of British treaty ports at Fuzhou, Xiamen, Ningbo, Shanghai and Canton (Guangzhou). After the Second Opium War (1856-60), other treat ports were established and France, the United States, Russia, Germany, Japan and others gained similar rights to the British from a weakened Chinese government.

In 2010, the metropolitan area county and district level jurisdictions of Guangzhou-Foshan had 18.3 million people. This is an increase of 4.4 million from 2000 and 11.6 million from 1982. This is surely a rapid rate of growth, but Shanghai and Beijing grew even faster over the last decade, each adding more than 6 million people.

Distribution of Population Growth: In contrast to Shanghai and Beijing, where virtually all of the growth has been outside the core, the Guangzhou-Foshan core is growing robustly. From 2000 to 2010, the core districts increased from a population of 4,040,000 to 5,050,000. With a land area of 107 square miles (279 square kilometers), the core is similar in size to the city (municipality) of Sacramento, which has less than one-tenth the population. The core density is 46,800 per square mile (18,100 per square kilometer), up from 37,500 per square mile (14,500 per square kilometer) in 2000. This is about one-third less dense than Manhattan or the ville de Paris (the central city).

However, as is typical for metropolitan areas around the world, Guangzhou-Foshan's growth has been most concentrated in suburban areas. The core accounted for 23% of the population growth over the past decade, while the suburbs accounted for 77%.

The inner suburbs grew from a population of 6,670,000 to 8,400,000. The density rose from 5,000 to 6,300 per square mile (1,900 to 2,500 per square kilometer), similar to that of the San Francisco urban area. The inner suburbs accounted for 39% of the growth and grew 26%.

The outer suburbs grew from a population of 3,150,000 to 8,200,000 over the past decade. The population density rose from 2,000 to 3,100 per square mile (800 to 1,200 per square kilometer), slightly more dense than the Philadelphia urban area and slightly less dense than the Portland urban area. The outer suburbs accounted for 38% of the growth and grew at the greatest rate, 53% (Figures 2 & 3, Table).

Guangzhou-Foshan Metropolitan Area & Urban Area
2000 & 2010 Census

Metropolitan Area	Core	Inner Suburbs	Outer Suburbs	Total
2000	4,040,000	6,670,000	3,150,000	13,860,000
2010	5,050,000	8,400,000	4,820,000	18,270,000
Change	1,010,000	1,730,000	1,670,000	4,410,000
%	25%	26%	53%	32%
Share of Growth	23%	39%	38%	100%
Area (KM2)	279	3,429	4,003	7,711
Area (Square Miles)	108	1,324	1,546	2,977
Density (KM2)	18,100	2,400	1,200	2,400
Density (Square Miles)	46,800	6,300	3,100	6,100

Urban Area	Core		Suburbs	Total
2010	5,050,000		11,225,000	16,275,000
Area (KM2)	279		2,894	3,173
Area (Square Miles)	108		1,117	1,225
Density (KM2)	18,100		3,900	5,100
Density (Square Miles)	46,800		10,000	13,300

Notes
Boundary changes render district area data incomplete.
Core: Yuexiu, Liwan, Haizhu, Tianhe
Inner Suburbs: Baiyun, Huangpu, Panyu, Nansha, Nanhai, Changcheng
Outer Suburbs: Huadu, Luogang, Gaoming, Shunde, Shanshi
Nansha is in the inner suburbs because 2000 data is combined with Panyu (should be in the outer suburbs)

Earlier data shows this suburban pattern has been a long term trend. Between 1982 and 2010, the suburbs accounted for 57% of the growth outside the city of Guangzhou as then defined (Figure 4). District boundary changes limit a more precise analysis based upon a core that did not include large areas without development.

The Guangzhou-Foshan Urban Area: The soon to be released 8th Annual Demographia World Urban Areas will show the Guangzhou urban area (area of continuous development within the metropolitan area) to have a population of approximately 16.275 million, with a land area of approximately 1,225 square miles (3,173 square kilometers). Barring later data from the multiple national censuses that will soon be reporting data, Guangzhou-Foshan is likely to be ranked the 14th largest urban area in the world. The population density is approximately 13,300 per square mile (5,100 per square kilometer), roughly comparable to the London or Barcelona urban areas. The suburbs of the urban area have a density of approximately 10,000 per square mile (3,900 per square kilometer). Most of the new residential development is multi-unit, such as high rise condominium buildings and work related housing, including dormitories. However, there is some detached housing, which is very expensive.

A Larger Metropolitan Area: In the longer run a much larger metropolitan (and urban) area could result, if Chinese residents begin traveling to work over much longer distances between these jurisdictions and should the border restrictions at Hong Kong and Macau be eliminated. To achieve this end, there will need to be important local transportation improvements between the jurisdictions, such as more urban railways (which are planned) and wider automobile ownership, to use the already comprehensive (toll) freeway system.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”

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Note: International metropolitan areas can now exist in the European Union, where there is free movement of labor across national borders. For example, the Lille metropolitan area is located in both France and Belgium. France and Switzerland (not a member of the European Union) provide another example, where treaty provisions permit international movement of labor with little difficulty in the resulting international metropolitan areas of Geneva (Switzerland-France) and Basel (Switzerland-France).

Photo (top): Pagoda: Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, Guangzhou (all photos by author)

How Libraries and Bookstores Became the New Community Centers

Michael Scott — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:15:59 -0500

Bookstores and libraries have long played a central role in fostering a deeper appreciation of knowledge, and in lifelong learning. Increasingly, these places are also filling another critical need in our communities, by providing a haven for those seeking a communal connection in an ever-more isolated world.

Ray Oldenburg, author of The Great Good Place, coined the term “third place” to describe any environment outside of the home and the workplace (first and second places, respectively) where people gather for deeper interpersonal connection. Third places include, for example, places of worship, community centers, and even diners or pubs frequented by the “locals.”

Third places, according to Oldenburg, are vitally important to the social fabric of communities because they facilitate the healthy exchange of ideas and provide a public venue for civil debate and community engagement.

Libraries and bookstores clearly are long-time ‘third places’ That shouldn’t be a surprise, given that books serve as the lingua franca of new ideas. Notice, though, that these establishments frequently provide coffee bars, meeting rooms, Wi-Fi access, public computer terminals, and other amenities. They serve as accessible retreats for community groups and clubs, offices for transitioning job-seekers or home-based business owners, logical meeting places for children’s literacy organizations, havens for latchkey kids, and bases of operation for homeless men and women as they try to reintegrate into the community. These are the features, probably more so than the rows of books and racks of periodicals, which grant libraries and bookstores their ‘third places’ status.

Libraries have been hit hard by the proliferation of home-based Internet access and digitized material. The impact is exacerbated by state and local budget cuts that place some libraries in a vicious downward spiral — reduced foot traffic from those with other options often is held out as “evidence” of library irrelevance, leading to more budget and staff cuts and further reduced access for those who need it.

Large libraries in major urban centers are particularly vulnerable, with their cavernous buildings and row upon row of books that are rarely touched. If libraries are to survive, city leaders and library boards must continue to explore creative solutions for the changing needs of their patrons. As economists would put it, they must “drive demand” for expanded library services.

A great example of success with this approach is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (www.sjlibrary.org) in San Jose, California. It purports to be the only institution of its kind: It serves as the primary library for both a major university and a major city. This joint partnership between the city of San Jose and San Jose State University was announced in 1997, and the primary building opened in 2003. It boasts over 7 floors and 1.6 million books. There are also dedicated rooms for quiet study sessions, teen activities and multimedia access. In effect, SJSU students have access to all the popular features of a typical public library, while the public has access to all the academic resources of a university library. The entire community is well served by this far-sighted collaboration.

It represents the convergence that is taking place between the traditional role that libraries have long played and the virtual world. According to a study funded by the American Library Association in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the number of U.S. libraries nationwide offering public Internet access has ballooned from under 13% in 1994 to nearly 100% today. What this suggests is that the role of libraries as technology hubs is increasingly supplanting their function as simply a repository of books.

The use of community space in libraries to access technology is particularly vital for low-income residents and for individuals in small towns where the library may be the only connection point for free Wi-Fi access.

Bookstores are confronting the dual challenge of staying both vital and profitable. The most successful brick and mortar bookstores have evolved into third places. Once just exclusively retail outlets, they now are quasi-library/community gathering spots with onsite coffee shops and free Wi-Fi access. While bookstores have always attracted those who wish to browse and kill time, they now also draw others, laden with backpacks, to research, write, and study. Bookstore-based reading groups abound.

But even when a bookstore embraces its role as a third place institution, its viability is not guaranteed. The bankruptcy and closure of more than 600 outlets of Borders Books nationwide is evidence of a shakeout in the retail book industry, amid the proliferation of electronic book portals such as Amazon, Apple and Google. Independent bookstores especially have struggled to maintain their niche in the marketplace (although they may have more flexibility to quickly embrace third place-related amenities).

The lesson in this case is that capitalism can be harsh. For example, Amazon’s controversial price comparison tool allows shoppers to scan bar codes to check prices at rival brick and mortar and online stores. But capitalism also encourages differentiation. As every good business owner knows, becoming a commodity dealer and competing only on price usually is a recipe for failure.

Rather, libraries should be more like bookstores, creating an inviting, leisurely environment. Bookstores should be more like libraries, providing community rooms and programs.

Both should think creatively about how to provide the things that online sellers cannot. That includes, of course, the pleasures of shelf browsing as opposed to web-based browsing. But beyond that, the most successful libraries and bookstores will embrace the opportunities for relevance that their special third place status enables.

Michael Scott is a speaker and co-host of the Internet radio show Bookmark Radio. He can be reached at michael@bookmarkradio.com. Photo by the author of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, Colorado.

Florida’s Quick Rebound

Richard Reep — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:38:28 -0500

Adding nearly 119,000 people in 2011, Florida has capped a decade of steady population increase to see the state grow 19% since 2000. Despite 2009, an historic year where more people left than arrived, the overall net growth of Florida has yielded two additional congressional seats, moving the state well on its way towards the becoming third most populous state in the nation. This ascendancy brings new responsibility to the shoulders of the state’s leaders, and the direction this state takes in the coming years will depend upon how Florida reacts to this influx of new population. It is time for true leadership to find appropriate voice for our state on the national scene.

Contrary to the predictions of many within the urbanist intelligentsia, Florida’s farm counties grew the fastest. Osceola County, just south of bustling Orlando, grew by 55%; sleepy Sumter County, northwest of Orlando, grew by 75%; and Flagler County, home to historic St. Augustine, nearly doubled in population. Tampa, Orlando, and Miami have each seen their healthy share of immigration, but Florida’s rural areas have dramatically increased their appeal over a decade ago.

At first this trend might be puzzling. Lacking urban amenities such as museums, transit, and Starbucks, parts of rural Florida seem almost timeless. Wildwood and Leesburg, nestled in the center of Florida, lack both beaches and theme parks. They have one thing, however, that the urban areas do not have: affordable housing. And this is the elusive reality that must be turned around by Florida’s leadership if the state is to grow in a responsible manner.

The Miami-Dade market has plenty of supply, but the average home lists for $509,000 . Up in Wildwood, the home lists for $175,000, and you get a lot more house for your money. People are voting with their feet for affordability.

It’s not the price alone that seems to be putting people off, however. Naples, which lists homes even higher than Miami, saw growth over the past ten years at a pace two and a half times that of Miami, and is expected to continue to grow at the same pace through 2015. Anecdotally, it seems that newcomers have relocated to their vacation homes after selling off their other high-priced property, usually in the north. They sometimes reduced their expectations of what they can receive for their old houses and then permanently located where they prefer to live. If the buyers are older, they still likely made a nice profit over the past few decades.

In Orange County, meanwhile, relieved realtors are finally starting to say goodbye to distressed properties. Appraiser Lee Barnes commented that “foreclosures and short sales are 40% fewer, compared to this time last year,” and in an economy fueled by growth, the welcome sight of occupied rooftops means that commercial real estate is beginning to come back. In fact, Orlando is near the top of the list in expected home price gains for 2012, a dramatic turnaround for the region.

Florida’s comeback is timed with some key changes in regulating real estate development. With state oversight all but vanquished by the governor, starving local counties welcome the property tax dollars associated with new growth. No other revenue, apart from a sales tax, provides much cash to operate government in the Sunshine State. This makes growth a priority.

But economic activity occurs in two forms: growth (making more stuff) and development (making stuff better). Quietly, in the past decade, Florida has added biomedical research clusters to its twin engines of growth and tourism, and this promises to increase greater resilience to the state economy.

Some signs, however, point to Florida abandoning this strategy and continuing its boom-bust mentality. The Governor, already warning the legislature of budget cuts in 2012, has expressed disappointment that the job creation return is poor on the State’s venture capital invested in bringing Scripps, Nemours, and other cutting-edge research organizations. He claims that are simply not adding jobs fast enough for his taste. Abandoning these investments could mean that the organizations reduce their presence or even abandon the state.

At the same time, Florida’s cities seem to be uncertain about how to tackle the problem of adding density without reducing affordability. Land prices haven’t wavered much in the recession, with stubborn property owners holding on to assets that won’t sell, and they may benefit from this land-banking strategy in the long run. Many who escape the Rust Belt and come to Florida express shock at the cost of living in the Sunshine State and are further dismayed over the quality of schools and surprising amount of congestion. This mismatch between cost of living and quality of life may be part of the reason why Florida’s five largest cities were listed among the nation’s “saddest” in a recent Time poll .

Casino gambling, a typical 1990s way to boost revenue, is being entertained by the Legislature, but other ideas should be considered as well. For one thing, investment in the future means a better education system, perhaps a higher priority than ostrich food subsidies (currently exempt from state sales tax ). Closing tax loopholes and fixing some long-broken parts of Florida’s tax code will help gain some badly-needed revenue.

Very large infrastructure projects are also important to make Florida competitive. On the east coast, NASA’s 60-year-old facilities need a major overhaul to continue providing America a spaceport for the 21st century and to pave the way for private space exploration. This will maintain the deep investment in human capital of which Floridians were once justly proud. The spaceport has a great deal of synergy with the National Simulation Center, located in Orlando, which is currently the country’s premier provider of military simulation and training.

In more than one region, the Florida Venture Capital Act has brought world-class biomedical research laboratories, making dramatic advancements in cancer, diabetes, children’s health, and other key areas. Already surging ahead and competing with area like Boston’s Research Center and the Silicon Valley, Florida must keep its edge in this field by continuing investment in the Venture Capital Fund.

On the west coast, the Tampa Port Authority is already preparing for the widening of the Panama Canal, working in collaboration with ports of Mobile and Houston to partner with ocean carriers. Continuing this investment and modernizing the logistics of truck and railroad traffic into the port is critical to make this economic engine prevail in the 21st century.

Such infrastructure investment will improve Florida’s already existing assets, allowing for prosperity and upward mobility to occur within the state. Competing with Texas will be difficult, given Florida’s lack of petrochemical resources, but the state’s native industry, tourism, has already made it a world-class destination. Florida’s leadership has already entered the national stage by saying “no” to high speed rail, but it has yet to define what it will say “yes” to. Without intelligent citizen input, the state will likely fall back on its traditional pattern of being a passive receiver of investment and people, but not a creator of great new enterprises.

In contrast to states like California and Texas, Florida has been willing to be eternally passive; Disney World is a classic example. Florida, a grateful recipient of this California enterprise, has benefitted secondarily, but the real power of this company still resides in Burbank. This story is played out over and over again, with real estate developers from Dallas and Atlanta continuing to define the face of the state, aided and abetted by Wall Street investors who see Florida primarily as a waterfront real estate asset with some moderate margins available in between coasts.

It is time for Florida to start doing, instead of being done to. With investment in real infrastructure, good education and intelligent leadership, Florida can assume its responsibility as one of America’s new high-profile states, capable of exporting science, technology, and culture. Our population growth contains within it the seeds of a bright future once we fix what is broken about our beautiful state.

Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

Three Cheers for Urban Sprawl

Martin Durkin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:38:04 -0500

“Hands off Our Land!” screams the Daily Telegraph, like some shotgun-toting red-faced farmer. The newspaper, on behalf of the reactionary toffs who form the least pleasant section of its readership, has launched a campaign directed against ‘urban sprawl’ (ie. the rest of us).

On a good day, the Telegraph serves up enlightened articles by progressive liberals like Janet Daley and Simon Heffer and Jeff Randal (I’m talking about real liberals here, not American Trotskyites). But then it disappears under the desk, drinks some devilish, bubbling potion and emerges looking like Mr Hyde, all wonky teeth and messy hair. “Hands off Our Land” is the Telegraph at its worst - a campaign to thwart the government’s all-too-modest suggestions to reform Britain’s vicious planning laws.

NIMBY (Not In My Back-Yard) is a misnomer. As James Heartfield observes in his brilliant book Let's Build! if it was their back-yard there wouldn’t be a problem. By “Our Land”, the Telegraph’s Colonel Blimps do not mean “land owned by us”. They mean “other people’s land”, over which they wish to continue to exercise control via the State.

The battle against suburbanisation (which the Greens these days clothe in the jargon of 'sustainability') has been going on for decades, and the success of the NIMBYs in keeping the bulk of Britain’s population locked inside towns and cities, has disfigured Britain and blighted the lives of millions of people. As a result of State planning restrictions, Britons are stuffed into towns and cities like battery-farmed chickens. We are among the most densely packed people in the world. In Britain, 90 percent of people live in urban areas. In Germany (which has a similar population density) only 75 percent of people live in urban areas, while only 68 percent of Italians live in urban areas, and only 62 percent of the Irish (is the Italian or Irish countryside so awful?). In India only 30 percent of the people live in urban areas.

And to make matters much worse for the Brits, our urban areas constitute a mere 9 percent of total land use. That’s right - 90 percent of the people crammed into 9 percent of Britain. Compare that to the 13 percent of land devoted to ‘Green Belt’ (the stuff holding us in). Even in the South East of England, by far the most densely crowded bit of the UK, woodland and farmland, absurdly, accounts for more than three quarters of land use.

Britain is not a crowded island – contrary to the frothing rants from the misanthropes at the Telegraph. Viewers wrote in to express their incredulity when the BBC broadcast a series called ‘Britain from Above’. The BBC helicopters filmed hour after hour of vast, unending tracts of flat, rectangular fields and giant swathes of green nothingness. It was astonishing to the naïve urbanites watching to see how empty the place was. (Just take a look on Google satellite images). The reason why Britain feels, to most of us, like an overcrowded island, is because all most of us ever see are congested towns and cities (or a fleeting glimpse of industrial farmland out of a car window as we travel along ‘urban corridors’ between towns).

Hemming people into towns and cities with ‘Green Belts’, has acted like a pressure-cooker on property prices. The planning system, by limiting the amount of land available to build on, has created an artificial shortage of living space, forcing up the prices of houses and flats to such astronomical heights that many young couples can only dream of affording one. The less affluent dare not get a job for fear of losing housing benefit. There are families in London where the children sleep three and four to a room – a tiny room in a dingy flat. Children who have outgrown their cots are forced to stay in them, sleeping with their legs bent (I have direct knowledge of such cases). It is impossible to document the sheer bloody misery caused by the planning system - countless examples of diminished lives. Even well paid professional couples in London now struggle to afford dark, crumbling Victorian houses, in rough parts of town. Houses built for costermongers and chimney sweeps in the late 19th Century.

But it goes far beyond property prices. Soaring urban land values have a knock-on effect, raising the cost of everything, from cinema tickets to shoes. The land and property shortage (artificially created remember) has pushed all prices up, reducing our quality of lives in a myriad of unseen ways. Meanwhile, the few remaining patches of green in our towns and cities are fast shrinking and disappearing. Gardens are designated ‘brown-field’ sites to allow more flats and houses to be built. Houses are horribly divided into tiny disfigured flats. School fields, parks and squares are shrinking and disappearing at an alarming rate, extra blocks of flats spring up everywhere, like weeds in the cracks. The shocking effect of Green Belts has been to empty our urban areas of green spaces, and yet, as State planners know fine well, these are the most cherished bits of green in Britain, giving far more people, far more pleasure than ‘the countryside’ (to which so few of us go). Worryingly, the London Planning Advisory Committee has decided that London has room for 570,000 extra homes. As James Heartfield pleads, ‘Do we really want every inch of London packed with houses, instead of parks, squares, playgrounds and other amenities?’ And of course transport in our congested urban areas has become a living hell. They cram us in then prohibit us from parking anywhere and charge us for causing ‘congestion’.

Nor is the misery confined to the towns. Green Belts have killed the countryside. Although a gigantic amount of Britain’s land mass is reserved for agriculture, farming accounts for less than one percent of Britain’s economic activity (and even this is massively subsidised). In the countryside itself, only 3 percent of people actually work in agriculture. It is argued the countryside must be preserved in order to protect traditional communities and ways of life. But there is nothing traditional about our countryside. The vast, boring fields you see today bear no resemblance to the small, labour-intensive agriculture of old. The landscape has changed, the ‘communities’ have changed, the economics has changed. Nor should we idealise what went before … grovelling, impoverished tenant small-holders and agricultural labourers (and before them serfs) breaking their backs to maintain the idle gentry. Life for the rural masses was poor, hard, dull and servile.

The NIMBYism of the new gentry (organised, for example, in the Council for the Protection of Rural England) has stunted and thwarted genuine economic development in the countryside. The vast bulk of Britain is now a wasteland, a poorly attended heritage theme-park, fit for well-heeled second-homers to live out their naff rural fantasy every third weekend. Ordinary folk in the countryside are reduced to working in National Trust postcard shops, and with their meagre wages, they struggle to afford small nasty-looking houses which face directly onto busy A-roads. No wonder the young want to get the hell out.

But the battle over planning laws has nothing to do with the giant wide open spaces in Northumbria and wherever else, because no-one in their right mind wants to go and live there. The land in dispute is in truth much smaller. The desire for planning restrictions is really an expression of upper class disdain for suburbs, and the people who live in them and like them. Peter Hall, the professor of planning at the Bartlett School of Architecture, in his book Cities of Tomorrow, exposes the motives behind ‘sustainable development’, which in effect means ‘pulling up the drawbridge to stop anyone else entering their well-healed enclaves (save a few select people like themselves, whom it would be quite fun to invite for drinks on Sundays) … pulling up the drawbridge against newcomers, especially if they lack the right income or right accent.’

The snobbery and hatred of the suburbs dates back to the end of the 19th Century. The railways allowed the first suburbs to flourish as the working and lower-middle-class ‘clerk’ class, experiencing prosperity for the first time, sought to escape the urban slums, to have a little house and a little garden. The suburbs were considered vile because of the people who inhabited them. In a book called The Suburbans, written in 1905, the poet T.W.H. Crossland launched a vitriolic attack on the ‘low and inferior species’, the ‘soulless’ class of ‘clerks’ who were spreading into the new comfortable houses in the suburbs, eating tinned salmon. He was disgusted by them, their aspiration to self improvement, offensively self-made and self-assured.

Professor John Carey, in his magnificent book The Intellectuals and the Masses, describes the widespread upper class loathing of the newly enriched masses and their suburban ways. In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, two characters are leaving England in an airplane. They recall Shakespeare’s description of England, ‘This precious stone set in a silver sea’, but then they look out the window. They see the ‘straggling’ suburbs, the hills sown with bungalows, the wireless masts and overhead power cables, and ‘men and women, indiscernible except as tiny spots’ who were ‘marrying and shopping and making money and having children.’ Then one of Waugh’s characters says, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

HG Wells contemptuously describes suburbs as a ‘tumorous growth’ … ‘ignoble’ Croydon and ‘tragic’ West Ham. Betjeman of course pleaded to the Nazis, ‘Come friendly bombs and land on Slough, it isn’t fit for humans now’. The suburbs were “Bathed in the yellow vomit” of sodium lamps. Carey describes Betjeman’s horror of the suburbs, ‘harbouring the mixed bag of atrocities with which Betjeman associates with progress – radios, cars, advertisements, labour-saving homes, peroxide blondes, crooked businessmen, litter, painted toenails and people who wear public-school ties to which they are not entitled.’

The vile lower orders had to be stopped. It is no accident that one of the key figures in post-war planning was Sir Patrick Abercrombie, founder and head of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. Planners like Abercrombie knew that ordinary folk were itching to escape the grimy crowded towns. But instead of the semi-detached houses with nice back gardens, which they craved, they would have to be stacked high in tower blocks. The planners knew that it wasn’t what people wanted. They knew that people wanted a little space of their own, with a little back lawn where they could keep an eye on their three-year old playing. A fairly modest, basic human desire in this day and age, you might think, and yet one they would be deprived of.

A system of Green Belts was devised to keep the proles locked in. Professor Hall refers to Green Belts, correctly, as ‘the polite English version of apartheid’ … ‘a system of controlling and regulating the suburban tide to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the United States’. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 effectively nationalised the right to develop land. Hall describes how the containment of the lower orders in increasingly crowded urban areas, and the resulting inflation of land and property prices, led to distress on a vast scale. Since land was so scarce and pricey, to build houses which people could actually afford, private builders were forced to build smaller and smaller homes, reducing the quality to make them less expensive.

As the private housing market was strangled, it was decided that instead the State would build inner-city accommodation for the masses. They were to be confined to urban areas, forced to live in high densities in high-rise blocks. Rather than chose their own home in a free market, ordinary people had to apply to the State to be housed and would be allocated one (a very nasty State produced home). By the 1970s around a third of the British population lived in State housing. The State thus determined how and where we should live. Over the years, it has become suffocating. Green spaces inside towns have shrunk or disappeared as more and more nasty council blocks have been crammed in. Early ‘leafy suburbs’ like Ealing have become more and more crowded and less and less leafy. Now, they feel like part of the towns, only without the attractions of the bright lights. In Britain, the dream of better living stopped in 1947.

We have had enough of all this crap about ‘protecting the countryside’. Planning (let us call it what it is: authoritarian State control of our lives) has always been primarily a tool of social prejudice. Behind the cult of the British countryside, from Wordsworth and Ruskin onwards, has always been contempt for the masses. Who are we protecting the ‘countryside’ for? And from whom are we protecting it?

Let us be honest about ‘the countryside’. These days it is largely made up of very big, very flat rectangular fields used for (largely pointless, subsidised) industrial farming … not at all beautiful and frankly the last place you would want to have a picnic. (Ironically most of the green rural fantasists in our midst tend to hang out in relatively crowded places like Southwold and Alderburgh (to enjoy the music festivals) and the ‘Wordsworth-country’ bit of the Lake District where Beatrix Potter lived.)

Very few bits of the countryside look like it does in Postman Pat, and these bits are enjoyed by very few people indeed. Let’s have more of them. Wonderfully landscaped areas – big ones - not far from towns and suburbs, accessible to lots of people, with adjacent toilets and cafes and car-parks. We do not want Green Belts, we want Green Patches – big parks and broad, lovely town squares, and large chunks of beautifully landscaped green spaces, close to where people live. We want green everyone can enjoy. And in between the green bits, we demand the freedom to build what we want, where we want. Three cheers for ‘Urban Sprawl’, the motor car, roads, supermarkets, golf courses and service stations.

It’s time to get angry with the angry-brigade at the Telegraph. To get angry with the organic, home-grown TV chefs and their agro-hobbyist friends, with the grungy middle class road protesters (imaging themselves to be radical), with the suburb-hating, supermarket-opposing, free-range chicken loving reactionaries, the metropolitan elite who can afford second-homes, yet who would deny first-homes to others, the heritage bores and bearded ramblers and people who drink cloudy expensive beer from local breweries and write bad guide books and erect plaques everywhere and think Ruskin had a point. It’s time to get angry with Prince Charles – the Dark Lord, and his toady friend Richard Rogers, who thinks we should all live in shoe-boxes. This collection of bigots are trying to keep us in our place. They have damaged the lives of millions of people. Now they must be stopped.

Martin Durkin is a documentary film director and TV producer based in the UK.

Photo from Bigstockphoto.com.

Urban Development: Playing Twister With The California Environmental Quality Act

Rick Cole — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:38:38 -0500

When it comes to environmental issues, emotions often trump reasoned argument or sensible reform, especially in California. In Sacramento at our state capitol, real world impacts are abstracted into barbed soundbites. It’s the dialogue of the deaf as environmental advocates rally around our landmark California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) -- and economic interests decry it as “a job killer.” Perhaps the polarization can be put aside to ask about a specific example in the real world. Why does an old K-Mart sit vacant on Ventura’s busiest boulevard despite initial City approval for a Walmart store? All the thunder and lightning surrounding whether a Walmart belongs in Ventura is behind us. A vigorous and contentious debate (and a failed citizen initiative) have rendered the verdict that filling an empty discount retail space with a different discount retailer is a function of the market, not government regulation.

Nor can we directly blame the stalemate directly on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). What keeps the store empty is not the controversial law itself, but the way it has been twisted like a pretzel into a tool to stop urban developments opposed by well-funded interests. Recently, the Los Angeles Times exposed the ironic way it has even been adapted by developers and big corporations to fend off their competition.

The California Environmental Quality Act is the toughest state environmental protection statute in the nation. Passed more than 40 years ago in the wake of the first Earth Day (and signed by Governor Ronald Reagan), CEQA has spawned an industry of specialist consultants, attorneys and planners. Its original laudable goals for managing natural resources have been obscured by the hard ball tactics of litigators in our state.

The vast majority of Californians support sensible environmental protections and are suspicious when business interests lobby to weaken them. They remember oil spills and toxic dumps and slash and burn hillside developments. Yet the case law that has grown up around CEQA is so burdensome that virtually any public or private project can be slowed or killed on bogus grounds that really have nothing whatever to do with protecting our natural environment.

Yes, the law has protected stands of redwood trees from clear-cutting and sensitive habitat from suburban sprawl. And there are David and Goliath stories: a little band of neighbors stop a mega-developer from flooding their neighborhood with traffic (although this is a long stretch from protecting “natural resources”.) But it is now routine for special interests to hire high-powered law firms to exploit the law for their own economic interests.

Here in Ventura, lawyers for construction unions combed over the Environmental Impact Report done for the new Community Memorial Hospital project with the goal of seizing on any technical errors or ambiguities. They fired off a thirty page “comment letter” which lays the groundwork for a lawsuit. The goal was certainly not “protecting the environment” — it was to pressure the hospital to use union labor for the construction. They were successful.

The proposed Walmart at the old K-Mart site is stalled after initial city approval because the company knows that even something as simple as changing the facade on the building could trigger a lawsuit alleging inadequate “environmental review.” So the project sits in limbo while Walmart analyzes its legal options. What Walmart fears is exactly what happened to WinnCo grocery, which did see its proposed new signage and facade challenged by a CEQA lawsuit.

There are lots of things not to like about development in a city. But that’s why we have planning commissions, public hearings and appeals to elected City Councils, along with detailed rules that must meet stringent legal guidelines for adoption and enforcement. But why have an elaborate land use entitlement and permit review process if it can be superseded by anyone with the resources to file a CEQA lawsuit? Democratic due process goes out the window, replaced by months or years of costly legal maneuvering.

No sensible person advocates repealing CEQA. But after forty years, it is past time to return to its original, laudable purpose and intent: to protect our natural environment and sustainably manage our natural resources.

Understandably, environmental advocates are skittish about tinkering with the law. There is precedent, however, for consensus reform. When the League of Conservation Voters pushed a bill to curb greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable regional planning, they won the support of both the League of California Cities and the Building Industry Association by incorporating a modest relaxation of onerous CEQA burdens on “infill development.” There’s lots more room for common sense consensus to separate environmental protection from a racket for special interest litigation.

One of the worst ways to proceed is to pick out individual projects for favorable CEQA treatment. That’s what’s happened on a couple of controversial stadium projects that won legislative relief from the typical CEQA procedural hurdles. Having to lobby Sacramento to pass a special law is a brutally stark example of special interest litigation. Football stadiums are not the only or even the most important projects held hostage by CEQA abuse. Comprehensive reform is long overdue.

In these economic times, the jobs lost to CEQA abuse aren’t offset by the ones created for CEQA experts and CEQA attorneys. California led the nation in protecting our state’s environment. If we can look past the symbolism that CEQA has assumed to both advocates and detractors, we’ll see that it’s urgent to restore the law’s original purpose and keep it from being hijacked for other agendas. That may be unlikely in today’s polarized political climate. That’s why it is crucial to bypass the soundbites and the symbolic posturing, and remember the real world fallout of failing to reform the way CEQA is administered in the Golden State.

Rick Cole is city manager of Ventura, California, and recipient of the Municipal Management Association of Southern California's Excellence in Government Award. He can be reached at RCole@ci.ventura.ca.us

Photo: The vacant K-Mart in Ventura, California

The Evolving Urban Form: Kolkata: 50 Mile City

Wendell Cox — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:46:14 -0500

More than a decade ago, the Sierra Club and I crossed keyboards over urban density. The Sierra Club had just posted a new "neighborhood consumption calculator," that gave visitors the opportunity to look at the purported impacts of various density levels. The Sierra Club designated 500 dwelling units per acre as "efficient urban." Independently, Randal O'Toole and I quickly were on the Internet pointing out the absurdity of such high density. I noted that the so-called "efficient urban" density was far higher than that of the "black hole" of Calcutta, and high enough for all US residents to live in the Portland urban area.

Within 24 hours of our responses, the "neighborhood consumption calendar" had been taken off the Internet. It was later to reappear with "efficient urban" density being discounted a full 80 percent, to 100 housing units per acre. This is still far more dense than nearly all of the world except for low income world shantytowns.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC): The central city of Calcutta, now called Kolkata, remains one of the densest on earth. Its population density is 63,000 per square mile (24,000 per square kilometer) is nearly the same density as in Manhattan or the Ville de Paris. More accurately, it resembles the entire urban area densities of Mumbai and Hong Kong. The expanding suburbs of Kolkata have a population density of 25,000 per square mile (9,000 per square kilometer). The next edition of Demographia World Urban Areas (due out in the spring) will estimate the population density of the Kolkata urban area at 30,000 per square mile (12,000 per square kilometer).

Kolkata's spreading urbanization, however, has been going on for at least a half century. Since the 1951 Census, the central city of Kolkata has accounted for only 19% of the urban area population growth. The central city has added nearly 1,800,000 people while the suburbs have added approximately 7,650,000 (Figure 1).

Over the past two decades, the central city's growth has been minimal, adding 87,000 people from 1991 to 2011, while the suburbs added more than 3 million new residents. This intensifies the pattern of the last half-century where most growth clustered close to the city core.

Between 1901 and 1951, 59% of the growth in the Kolkata urban area was in the central city (Kolkata lost the British capital to Delhi in 1911).

Photo: Victoria Memorial, KMC

Slower Growth in the Urban Area: Kolkata is an unusually shaped urban area, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) long and stretched along the Hooghly River, one of the many mouths of the Ganges. Dhaka, the megacity capital of Bangladesh used to be on a mouth, until the river's course changed. The urban area averages little more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) in width. The municipality of Kolkata is in the south, on the east bank of the Hooghly, with most of the suburbs to the north or just across the river.

Like a number of major urban areas around the world, Kolkata has seen its population growth slow markedly. The peak population growth decade was the 1930s, when there was an increase of 69%. Growth dropped to 29% during the 1940s but continued at 20% or more until 2001. However, between 2001 and 2011, the urban area growth rate dropped to 7%, as the area added only 900,000 new residents. Despite its earlier, smaller size, the Kolkata urban area had not added this few people since the 1921 to 1931 decade.

In reality, Kolkata is getting less dense by the day. The results of the 2011 Census of India showed that every new resident of the Kolkata urban area was added in the suburbs (Note 1). Yes, the central city of Kolkata remains very dense but its population fell from 4,573,000 people in 2001 to 4,487,000 people in 2011. At the same time, the population of suburban Kolkata grew by nearly 1,000,000 people, and accounted for 110% of the population growth.

Photo: Howra Bridge, Hooghly River (Howra)

Kolkata, Los Angeles and China: It also may seem strange that despite its huge typically third world growth since 1951, the Kolkata urban area grew at a rate similar to that of the Los Angeles urban area (Note 2). Los Angeles was larger from the 1960s to 1990, while Kolkata was larger in the 1950s and has been larger the last two decades (Figure 2). Still, Kolkata's growth has fallen to high income world rates. Other Asian megacities (over ten million) including Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, Shenzhen, Manila, Jakarta, Dhaka and Guangzhou) have all experienced much faster growth over the past decade (Note 2). Shanghai and Beijing combined added nearly the same number of people as live in Kolkata.

Hyper-Densities: Nonetheless, Kolkata continues to have some of the highest densities in the world. In 2001, one third of the central city population (1.49 million) live in slums and shantytowns (photo). They are crammed into just 2 square miles (5 square miles). This would be like all the population of the San Fernando Valley living within a radius 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of Los Angeles City Hall or all the population of the city of Dallas in the space covered by the passenger terminals at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. This is more than 725,000 people per square mile (280,000 per square kilometer), and would nearly equal the "efficient density" definition that the Sierra Club wisely discarded. It can only be hoped that when the 2011 Census slum data is available, it will show that all of the city of Kolkata's population loss will have been from the slums.

Kolkata, like that of other large urban areas around the world described in The Evolving Urban Form series, shows that, given a chance, people reveal their preferences by moving to more space, to construct a better life for themselves and their households.

Photo: KMC Slum

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”

Kolkata Urban Area: Population 1901-2011

Year	Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC)	Suburbs	Kolkata Urban Area (Urban Aggolmeration)	KMC Share of Growth	KMC Growth	Suburban Growth
1901	848,000	662,000	1,510,000	56.2%
1911	896,000	849,000	1,745,000	51.3%	5.7%	28.2%
1921	1,031,000	854,000	1,885,000	54.7%	15.1%	0.6%
1931	1,141,000	998,000	2,139,000	53.3%	10.7%	16.9%
1941	2,109,000	1,512,000	3,621,000	58.2%	84.8%	51.5%
1951	2,698,000	1,972,000	4,670,000	57.8%	27.9%	30.4%
1961	2,927,000	3,057,000	5,984,000	48.9%	8.5%	55.0%
1971	3,149,000	4,271,000	7,420,000	42.4%	7.6%	39.7%
1981	3,305,006	5,888,994	9,194,000	35.9%	5.0%	37.9%
1991	4,400,000	6,622,000	11,022,000	39.9%	33.1%	12.4%
2001	4,573,000	8,633,000	13,206,000	34.6%	3.9%	30.4%
2011	4,487,000	9,626,000	14,113,000	31.8%	-1.9%	11.5%

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(Lead Photo: Mahatma Gandhi Road, KMC.

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Note 1: This is the Kolkata "urban agglomeration," which is the term the Census of India uses to denote urban areas, or areas of continuous urban development. The Census of India, however, applies to criteria to its urban area definitions that make them difficult to compare to urban areas in other parts of the world. The Census of India does not, for example, allow an urban agglomeration to be defined across state lines. Thus, the Delhi urban area continues to be shown as smaller then the Mumbai urban area. This is despite the fact that the immediately adjacent urbanization of Delhi includes millions of additional people in the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and is by international definition by far the largest urban areas in India. The other difficulty is that the Census of India includes the entire land area of any municipality in the urban area. Thus, where municipalities are particularly large in area, as in the case of Mumbai, considerably more land area is reported that he is truly urban. This can lower urban area densities by the inclusion of large areas that are rural. In the case of the call, urban area, the municipalities are generally much smaller, and the geographical definition of the Census of India is much closer to a genuine definition of an urban area or urban agglomeration.

Note 2: The Mission Viejo urban area is included in the 2000 Los Angeles urban area population in this comparison. Much of this urban area was included in Los Angeles before the 2000 census and it seems likely that it will be reunited with Los Angeles in 2010. The 2010 US urban area geographical definitions have not yet been released. Based upon the change in the Los Angeles metropolitan area population, it is assumed that the Census Bureau's urban area will show a population of approximately 12.5 million.

Note 3: Chongqing is sometimes incorrectly characterized as a megacity, because of its status of a "provincial level municipality" in China. However, the Chongqing provincial municipality is largely rural, and covers a land area similar to that of Austria or Indiana. The Chongqing urban area has a population of approximately 7 million.

California's Deficit: The Jerry Brown and 'Think Long' Debate

Bill Watkins — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:38:41 -0500

California has three major problems: persistent high unemployment, persistent deficits, and persistently volatile state revenues. Unfortunately, the only one of these that gets any attention is the persistent deficit. It is even more unfortunate that many of the proposals to reduce the deficits are likely to make all three of the problems worse over the long run.

Two major proposals to deal with the deficit will shape the coming debate. One is from the newly formed Think Long for California Committee; the other from the governor.

Governor Jerry Brown’s plan would increase sales taxes, and would increase the tax rate on the portion of anyone’s income that is over $250,000 (the marginal rate). It is a general rule of tax analysis that if you want there to be less of something, tax it. Indeed, this proposal would result in some wealthier people leaving California, and it would accelerate the trend of substituting internet retail purchases for local retail purchases.

It would also increase California's tax receipt volatility. California's tax base is dependent on the income of a relatively small group of wealthy people. It turns out that this income is more volatile than the economy. Increasing top marginal tax rates would only increase the volatility of the state’s revenue.

So, why would the governor make such a silly proposal? I've heard a few reasons.

• The government is starving and it needs the income now.

This is nonsense. Combined national, state, and local government spending is now over 35 percent of gross product. This is highest it has ever been, including the peak spending years of World War II.

We can disagree on the optimal size of government, but to argue that this is a time of scarce government spending is absurd.

• The wealthy have too much money. We must increase the progressivity of California's tax code.

The governor's proposal will do that. If implemented, the plan will give California the highest marginal tax rates in the United States. The problem is that people with high incomes often have more choices than most of us. They can move. They can reallocate earnings to other states or into less-taxed activities. They can just forego earnings if the return is too low.

Most analysts agree that California's tax structure should be broader based. The only way to do that is to make the system less progressive, not more progressive. Increasing taxes on the wealthy may feel good when the law is implemented, but it will eventually lead to lower tax revenues, increased revenue volatility, and slower economic growth.

• There is nothing else we can do. The political situation does not allow a better fix.

It never will be easy to implement comprehensive tax reform in California. There are too many groups with too much at stake. However, it is senseless to argue that we should therefore increase the distortions in an already distorted tax code. California has been doing this for years, and it just keeps making things worse. California's governance is a mess precisely because it is the result of hundreds of ad-hoc decisions.

California desperately needs comprehensive tax reform, "if not now, when?"

Which brings us to the proposal by the Think Long for California Committee . The Think Long committee is a subset of California's political elite. You will recognize many of the names; for a start: Nicolas Berggruen, Eli Broad, Willie Brown, Gray Davis, Condoleeza Rice, Bob Hertzberg, Eric Schmidt, Terry Semel, Laura Tyson, and George Schultz. The proposal has three components:

Empowering Local Governments and Regions: Here's what it says about decentralizing decision-making: "While the committee embraces the principles of de-centralization, devolution and realignment of revenues and responsibilities, we have not endeavored to propose precisely how that should be accomplished."

That's a bit like endorsing Mom and apple pie, isn't it? The committee has not earned itself any honor or credibility by failing to have a proposal for one of the three major components of its plan, the first that it enunciates.

Improving Accountability: "The Citizens Council For Government Accountability – an independent, impartial and non-partisan body – would be established to develop a vision encompassing long-term goals for California’s future."

Only, it is not a citizens group at all. It would be funded by the state, and it would have access to state agencies for support. Nine of the committee's thirteen members would be appointed by the governor, two of whom could not be registered in either party. The Senate Rules Committee and the Speaker of the Assembly would each appoint two members, one from each major party. The committee would have four non-voting ex-officio members: the director of finance, the state treasurer, the state controller, and the attorney general.

That sounds to me a lot like just another government agency. Not exactly; this would be a super-committee with broad powers. It would soon be involved in almost every aspect of California's government. The committee would have subpoena power, and the ability to publish on the election ballot its comments and positions on proposed ballot initiatives and referendums, as well as to place initiatives directly on the ballot.

Giving the committee the ability to place initiatives directly on the ballot is a nice touch in a document that elsewhere tries to make it more difficult for others to place initiatives on the ballot.

Restructuring the Tax Code: California's tax code needs restructuring, no doubt about that. This proposal doesn't get us to where we need to be, though. It reduces sales tax rates, top marginal income and business tax rates, and deductions from personal income taxes, except for education and health care, and for taxing services.

In general, these are steps in the right direction. However, exempting education and healthcare is a serious, perhaps fatal, flaw. It amounts to a huge subsidy for those industries, and places an extraordinary burden on the remaining service providers. The exempted industries are big, and exempting them means higher taxes on other service providers.

Who would actually bear the tax burden? That depends on the elasticities of supply and demand. In general, when demand is less elastic than supply (when the consumer is relatively indifferent to price changes), the consumer bears the tax burden, which is what is desired. However, for many services, it would appear that demand is not that inelastic.

Consumers can easily reduce the frequency of services such as haircuts, lawn maintenance, and the like. This would shift the burden of the tax from the consumer to the provider, that is, the hairdresser or landscape worker. In many cases, these are very low-income workers, making the tax extraordinarily regressive. California's tax code needs to be less progressive, but this could be a huge regressive swing, one that would create extreme hardships for some of our least advantaged citizens.

Economic theory is clear that there are fewer distortions in consumption taxes than in income and capital taxes. However, these models assume that the tax burden is squarely placed on the consumer. It appears that for many services this may be impossible. Perhaps that is why we don't observe many service taxes.

It is also the case that, in many services, taxes are avoided by the use of cash transactions. Estimates of the size of the "underground economy" vary, but most economists believe it is significant. A tax on services would likely increase its size dramatically.

The Think Long proposal is not the solution to California's challenges. It does, however, represent far more thought than went into the governor's proposal. It provides a service, in that it provides a starting point for a conversation that California desperately needs.

Photo by Randy Bayne; California Governor Jerry Brown

Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org

The Driving Decline: Not a "Sea Change"

Wendell Cox — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:38:29 -0500

The latest figures from the United States Department of Transportation indicate that driving volumes remain depressed. In the 12 months ended in September 2011, driving was 1.1 percent below the same period five years ago. Since 2006, the year that employment peaked, driving has remained fairly steady, rising in two years (the peak was 2007) and falling in three years. At the same time, the population has grown by approximately four percent. As a result, the driving per household has fallen by approximately five percent.

There are likely a number of reasons for the driving decline, some of which are described below.

Democratization of Mobility: The leveling off of driving is something analysts have expected for some time. More than ten years ago, Alan Pisarski noted that drivers licenses and automobility had saturated the market among the While-non-Hispanic population. For decades, driving had been increasing at a substantially faster rate than the population, as driving rates for women and minorities converged upon the rate of White-non-Hispanic males.

Clearly, the continued, extraordinary increase in driving of recent decades could not be expected to continue, since nearly all were already driving. Pisarski called this the "democratization of mobility" in a 1999 paper. At that time only African-Americans and Hispanics were still behind the curve. The recent economic difficulties have slowed the progress toward equal automobility for minorities. In 2009, American Community Survey data indicates that the share of Hispanic households without access to a car remained 40 percent above White-non-Hispanic Whites. The rate of African-American no-car households was 20 percent above that of White-non-Hispanics. The driving decline reflects in large part the failure of the economy to produce equal mobility opportunities for minority households.

Higher Gasoline Prices and the Middle Class Squeeze: One of the most important factors has to be the unprecedented increase in gasoline prices. Over the past decade, gasoline prices have doubled (adjusted for inflation) and have remained persistently high. It has worsened in the last five years, with prices having risen more rapidly than in any period relative to the previous decade in the 80 years for which there are records. This has taken a huge toll on households. At average driving rates, budgets have increased by nearly $1,800 annually to pay for the higher gasoline prices. In a time (2000-2010) that median household incomes declined $3,700 (inflation adjusted), it is not surprising that people are driving less.

Unemployment: Not Driving to Work: Today's higher unemployment means that fewer people are driving to work. Employment peaked in 2006. Assuming average work trip travel distances, the smaller number of people working now would reduce travel per household by more than one percent (one-fifth of the household reduction).

Shopping Less Frequently due to Higher Gasoline Prices: According to the Nationwide Household and Transportation Survey (2009), the average household makes 468 shopping trips annually. If shopping trips were reduced by one quarter in response to higher gasoline prices, the reduction in travel per household would be enough, along with the work trip reductions, to account for all of the decline over the past five years.

Information Technology: Not Driving and Telecommuting Instead: Again, advances in information technology appear to have also added to the decline. Even while employment was falling, working at home (mainly telecommuting) increased almost 10 percent between 2006 and 2010 (latest data available) and telecommuting added six times as many commuters as transit. Working at home eliminates the work trip and is thus the most sustainable mode of access to employment. In just four years, in working at home removed as much automobile travel to work as occurs every day in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area.

More Information Technology: Not Driving and Texting Instead? Adie Tomer at the Brookings Institution notes a decline in the share of people 19 years and under who have drivers licenses as potentially contributing to the trend. She cites University of Michigan research by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, who documented the decline. Sivak told The Michigan Daily that "a major reason for the trend is the shift toward electronic communication among America’s youth, reducing the need for 'actual contact among young people.'"

Still More Information Technology: Not Driving and Shopping On-Line Instead? And, as with electronic communication and telecommuting, there is also an information technology angle to shopping. The substantial increase in on-line shopping could be reducing shopping trips.

Not Making Intercity Trips? All of the loss in driving has been in rural areas, rather than urban areas. Since the employment peak in 2006, urban driving has increased 0.4 percent (though driving per household has decreased). By comparison, rural driving has declined 6.0 percent (Note). This much larger rural driving decline could be an indication that people have reduced discretionary travel, such as longer trips that extend beyond the fringes of urban areas (Figure). As with transit, however, it would be a mistake to characterize Amtrak as having attracted much of the reduced rural travel (or for that matter from airlines, see If Wishes were Iron Horses: Amtrak Gaining Airline Riders?). Over the period, Amtrak's gain (passenger mile) has been approximately one percent of the rural loss.

Not Driving and not Transferring to Transit: Transit ridership trends have been generally positive over the past decade. Since 2006, transit ridership has risen 3.4 percent. This compares to the 1.1 percent decline in automobile use. However, it would be incorrect to assume attraction to transit as contributing materially to the decline in driving. Because transit has such a small market, even this healthy increase has budged its urban market share (now approximately 1.7 percent) up by barely 0.5 percentage points.

Besides scale, there is another reason transit has not been the beneficiary of the driving reduction. Automobile competitive transit service is simply not accessible for most trips. For example, it is estimated that less than four percent of metropolitan jobs can be reached in 30 minutes by transit for the average metropolitan area resident. This compares to the more than 65 percent of automobile commuters who do reach their jobs in 30 minutes or less. In short, transit is not an alternative to the car for the vast majority of urban trips.

It does no good to suggest this can be materially improved by increasing transit service. The most lucrative transit markets are already served, and new ones would be more expensive. This is illustrated by the exorbitant cost of adding ridership. Over the most recent decade, transit ridership increased 21 percent, which required an expenditure increase of 59 percent, nearly three times as much.

Decentralization of Jobs and Residences: The 2010 census indicated that the American households continue to decentralize, increasingly choosing to live in single-family detached houses in the suburbs. The same trend has been occurring in employment locations, as Brookings Institution research indicates. Between 1998 and 2006, less than one percent of new employment was located within three miles of urban cores. Nearly 70 percent of the new jobs decentralized to outer suburban rings.

The continuing dispersion of jobs and residences could dampen the increase rate of driving in the years to come, as households have greater opportunities to live in the suburban surroundings they prefer, while also commuting to the more proximate jobs that have moved to the suburbs.

The Decline in Context: Among the potential causes, certainly the most important is the economic situation,with steeply declining household incomes and the worst economic situation since the 1930s. The longer term driving trends will be more apparent when (and if) prosperity restores healthy growth in employment. Moreover, with only a small part of travel being attracted to transit, a more significant shift could involve substitution of access by information technology (on-line). Even with the decline, however, there has been nothing like a "sea change" in how the nation travels.

Note: The data on driving is estimated from Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) reports. FHWA produces monthly preliminary estimates, which are subsequently adjusted in annual reports.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”

Photograph: Harbor Freeway, Los Angeles