Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs (mainly roads, but water, sewer, schools becomes more difficult to support without density). It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.
> Sprawl leads to cheaper housing at the cost of more expensive infrastructure costs
Nope. Sprawl's infrastructure cost is about the same as urban cost over time. This is because maintenance of city infrastructure is way more expensive.
"Expensive roads" are also a myth. As I said, one mile of NYC subway can cost as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway.
Or another point, Seattle is building subway expansion at the cost of $60B. It's projected to increase rideship by about ~100k daily passengers. For that $60B we could have instead built a city, gave 100k people houses for free, and still have enough money left to allow them to live on investment income from that.
Sure, we'll need to do some small adjustments: switch from giant SUVs to medium-sized and small-sized EVs. Improve pedestrian and bicycle accessibility within suburban villages, etc. But these are all relatively minor changes that can be done gradually.
> It also leads to places that are not very nice to live at.
Most people surveyed (80+%) would prefer to live in suburbs if they could. Yep, very unpleasant places.
The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis).
Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain. Switching to EVs only really solves pollution and energy usage problems, it doesn’t make traffic somehow more streamlined.
> The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints.
"Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch".
If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric.
Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC. Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300). Houston also has less income inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.51 vs 0.55 for NYC).
Texas has one of the highest drunk driving scores, and New York has one of the lowest: https://zutobi.com/us/driver-guides/the-us-dui-report. That's just one of the things that makes living in cities with public transportation and less sprawl so much nicer.
> Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minutes for NYC.
I'd take a 33 minute train commute over a 26 minute car commute any day. I'd take a 1 hour train commute over a 26 minute car commute even. When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time. On a train, I can read a book, use my phone, etc. The experience of commuting by car absolutely sucks, and is considerably more expensive.
> Per-capita income after taxes is similar, and housing costs in Houston are not even in the same league ($3000 average rent vs $1300).
You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer ($3100/m vs $2200; see: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...). Also, using average here is misleading. You can live in the outer boroughs and pay a lot less than that, and some areas in manhattan drive the average up a lot.
You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city. I live in Tokyo and used the train once so far this week. I'll be using it again today. On a normal basis, I have everything I need within a 5-10 minute walk.
>> Roads are a bad value for what you get. Not only is the throughput not great, they are expensive to maintain.
> You're making factually false statement after factually false statement.
On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used, when it's ubiquitous enough to be used as a primary method. You can increase throughput by increasing train frequency, which improves commute times. When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.
> Texas has one of the highest drunk driving scores, and New York has one of the lowest
And so?
> When you commute by car you have to be paying attention the entire time.
Self-driving software will fix this within a decade. It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.
> You need to also include the cost of transportation, which brings this figure a lot closer
Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.
> You also have to take into consideration the fact that sprawl forces you into that car pretty often. You need to use the car to go grocery shopping, whereas you can walk to a grocery store in a dense city.
Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days. I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.
> On a total usage basis, public transportation is considerably cheaper than roads, because as a whole, public transportation tends to be very highly used
That's not true. The average bus load in the US is 16 people. This makes it close to the car cost, only just a bit more efficient. It also does not consider the cost of wasted personal time.
> When roads are heavily used, the throughput decreases, commute times increase, and expanding roads doesn't help that situation.
It does, actually. More roads/lanes almost always increase throughput. They don't necessarily increase the average _speed_.
But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.
Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US? Or are you just reading the horror stories about "car hells"? Try it yourself to see the drawbacks and advantages.
I personally had lived in Europe and used transit and biking a lot. Including the bike hell of Amsterdam. I got my driving license at the age of 30 and my first car at 32.
> Self-driving software will fix this within a decade.
And it'll be powered by fusion energy!
> It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.
This isn't true. No car has reached level 5, which means that you're required to be able to take over. I'd really hope you're not doing this. If this is legal anywhere, those politicians are truly idiots.
> Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.
This one actually hurts a bit, because a very large percentage of road infrastructure is funded by federal taxes, which I'd really love to reduce, whereas a majority of public transportation is funded by local or state taxes. Another thing to note is that public transportation is partially funded by usage, whereas road infrastructure is not.
You need to include cost of transportation, because the cost of a car is extremely high, and this disproportionally affects the poor.
> I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.
> Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days.
The grocery store is just one example. You also need to fill your gas tank 1-2 times a week, wash the car, take it in for maintenance, etc. Every restaurant trip is a car ride, when you want to go to a bar, a car ride (or hopefully a taxi/lyft/uber). Thanks to density, I can walk to all of these things in ~10 minutes.
> The average bus load in the US is 16 people.
Again, using an average here isn't reasonable, especially when you're averaging across the US. You need to look at cities that have good public transportation that ubiquitous enough for use. NYC, and SF, for instance have considerably higher bus loads. When you look at train loads it's not even close to comparable.
> But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.
Not in cities with subway systems, or in cities where transit is prioritized over cars.
> Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US?
I grew up in New Orleans (until around 30). I've lived in SF, NYC, and Tokyo. I've traveled lots of places. I have enough experience between both to know which is obviously superior in terms of general life quality.
Cities with sprawl are less fun. Commuting sucks (especially during commuter hours, where you get stuck in traffic). Parking sucks. Maintaining a car sucks. Paying the expense of cars sucks. Not being able to walk anywhere because cars are the priority sucks.
Walkable cities are more fun. There's a reason that people go to vacation to these places, and not places like houston.
Just wanted to chime in and agree with cyberax. I’m living in a dense, beautiful European city, in a heritage listed building near the historic centre.
If I got a US visa tomorrow I’d be on the first flight to the Houston or Dallas suburbs. Judging by the growth rates of Texas cities - compared to the growth rates of old European ones - lots of people agree.
Pretty =/= functional. There are costs to density that aren’t immediately apparent, and advantages to having space that people who are used to it may not appreciate.
I want a yard. Well, I want to live someplace with a yard, and I have one. A place with a pool, and room for my dogs to run. I live "in town" but I have a yard. I don't want to live in a dense urban area. Some do, but I'll bet they tend to be younger and don't have kids or have younger ones. People want space. How about we make roads and cars cheaper instead of demonizing owning actual land? That's why suburbs are popular, why they'll stay popular, no matter how much strongtowns.com tries to push something else.
You accuse others of 'swallowing urbanist propaganda' but that's both highly uncharitable and also grossly ignorant given the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
> the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
Of course there is a high demand for urban areas. It's an effect of runaway density. Companies have competitive advantage if they locate their offices in The Downtown of a large city. This in turn makes the area around it more expensive, as people try to move closer to avoid longer commutes.
This is a vicious circle, leading to a sort of "density pollution".
And it should be solved in exactly the same way we dealt with other forms of pollution: via regulation and gradual tightening of rules.
"Nope, sorry, your company's locating here would push downtown density past the limit, you should find a greenfield site on the edge of town and build something new there"
A hard limit on the amount of office space per square mile. You simply can not build any more offices. The market forces then will take care of distributing the office space accordingly.
If you absolutely NEED to have an office in The Downtown, then you will just have to pay $$$$$$$$$. Otherwise you'll have to rent an office in a nearby suburbian village center.
Kind of like we did cap-and-trade for sulfur emissions.
Maybe to ensure that the country is evenly developed, which would make housing more affordable across the entire country. The US is not even that bad - unlike many other countries, it doesn't have a true primate city[1] on a national level. I'm thinking of places like England, where the privileged areas of London (and the Home Counties), Oxford, and Cambridge are the only place to earn a decent salary, but have extortionate housing costs, while the rest of the country has much lower housing costs but such lower wages that people are pushed to migrate into the privileged areas, pushing housing costs there even higher. Densifying the cities would help to some extent, but construction tends to cost a lot more in these cities, and not entirely due to zoning, planning permissions, etc.
I've been observing the discussion on sprawl vs high density in the US from the safety of my commie block and my conclusion is that sprawl is silly, but cities the density of New York are dystopian.
It appears that the same induced demand that makes traffic eventually occupy all lanes, no matter how many you build, works to make dense cities unaffordable and impossible to maintain.
There's a middle ground to be achieved here, really, and it's better than both the extreme views I've been hearing over and over again.
Your choice of metrics is so nonsensical it can only be bad faith. For the other readers, I'll submit some more relevant questions.
NYC subway is more expensive per meter? No shit. What's the ROI? How many passengers per day? What do you think are the economic payoffs for those investments?
What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs? A suburb versus what? What kind of respondents do you think they got? How do you reconcile this with the market reality of brutal real estate shortages in America's denser cities? (Just pull up some pricing per sqft. How do urban vs rural compare?)
This is all even without taking into account the market distortions (and ponzi schemes) arising from the US's infrastructure sprawl since the 50s. What happens if/when the cities stop subsidizing the completely financially insolvent surrounding areas?
> NYC subway is more expensive per meter? No shit. What's the ROI? How many passengers per day? What do you think are the economic payoffs for those investments?
I don't think infrastructure in NYC is cost-effective. For that matter, infrastructure in Seattle (where I live now) is not cost effective.
Its ROI is in fact negative, as it forces further unsustainable agglomeration of wealth in a small area, while starving smaller cities.
> What survey showed 80% of respondents preferring suburbs?
For anyone reading my response to this incredibly bad faith commenter, note:
- that his own linked survey shows 46% preferring suburbs, not 80%
- that "it forces further unsustainable agglomeration of wealth in a small area" would suggest a very high ROI, actually (and "forces" is an interesting word choice vs "attracts")
- this Lafayette case study shows exactly how denser areas pay for themselves in tax revenue, and how the surrounding ones don't [0]
Sprawl with competing “centres” I think is fine. Sprawl where everyone is trying to get to the centre for work and play not so much. London has good sprawl IMO. I doubt it affects affordable housing.
Although it may make houses more affordable vs. appartments.
