Category Archives: Land Use

Measuring the Costs of Sprawl

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Introduction

Cities are complex and that makes it hard to measure the costs and benefits of sprawl. Most real cities have a mix of neighborhood types built over generations. Real estate markets are highly regulated. Passionate voices in the debate can exaggerate claims. Still, there is growing evidence that some neighborhood types cost cities more to serve. These findings can guide city planning, but the built environment changes very slowly. Strategies beyond smart growth are needed to help communities become more sustainable in the short run.

Variety of Urban Densities

Variety of Urban Densities

Practical and Rhetorical Definitions

Sprawl and smart growth are not helpful terms for development and planning. The debate has rendered them stereotypes that have more emotional appeal than practical application. To its opponents, “SPRAWL” means a gluttonous waste of land where buildings are widely scattered across the land with no logic. It destroys valuable farm land and drives nature back on its heels. Likewise, foes of “SMART GROWTH” pronounce that it robs people of their property rights and compels them to live in hovels or like sardines crammed into dark towers.

In fact, most cities were built over generations and centuries. They have neighborhoods that represent the best and worst types of sprawl and smart growth. Real estate markets are heavily regulated by state and local ordinances. There are always people who think their property rights are being restricted no matter their favored urban form. In addition, real estate markets are distorted by federal laws that influence home and commercial financing. Given these complexities, ideal studies of the costs and benefits of neighborhood form will look at small sections of a city and carefully measure the many qualities that account for neighborhood form. Unfortunately, most research so far has looked at entire cities. They also tend to use density as the measure of sprawl.

Density is an Incomplete Measure of Sprawl and Smart Growth

Research that focuses on density alone can’t give good guidance to city planners and builders. As we saw recently, other qualities are more important to the attractiveness and efficiency of neighborhoods. Things like distance between uses, lot and building sizes, sidewalks and the road networks define whether a neighborhood is sprawling or not. These are really qualities of neighborhood design that determine if density causes problems like congestion and higher costs or whether it promotes efficiency and housing value.

Up to the early 20th Century, U.S. neighborhoods had a density of over 30 units per acre. This was accomplished with row houses and small apartments mixed among single-family homes. These are not generally considered sprawling communities. A typical single family neighborhood by the mid 20th Century had 4 to 6 units per acre. These are generally considered sprawling. At the same time, new urbanist or traditional neighborhood design approaches can deliver mostly single family communities that have densities up to about 25 units per acre. These communities successfully combine the connectivity and efficiency of smart growth with the privacy and open space benefits of traditional suburbs. With the limits of density as a metric in mind, what do we find in the cost of sprawl literature?

Sprawl Cost Studies

There is a growing body of research that confirms sprawling neighborhoods and, or, lower density neighborhoods increase municipal infrastructure and service costs. The following results are drawn from reports you can find here, here and here. Sprawl increases delivering municipal services. Many case studies and nationwide reviews reveal savings that range from 5 to 40 percent. The most detailed and objective studies find at least 5 to 10 percent savings. We should consider these as absolute minimum savings from smarter development regulations. There are diminishing returns to the benefits of density. Service costs fall the fastest when the population density increases from 500 per square mile (essentially rural) to about 2000 per square mile. Memphis and Tulsa have densities at 2,053 and 1,992, respectively. There are additional, but smaller savings moving to 4000 people per square mile. Denver (at 3,923) and San Diego (at 4,020) are examples. Many northern Dallas council districts and suburbs in southern Collin County are also built at about a 4,000 per square mile density. There appear to be slight additional savings for additional increases in density.

Need for Immediate Solutions

Cities with a lot of room to grow have a lot to gain from policies that let the market deliver less sprawling neighborhoods. There are also opportunities to gradually redevelop sections of existing communities with smarter development. Cities should provide the flexibility for the large minority of households who want to live in a more traditional, low-density urban neighborhood. From a property value standpoint, many cities can also benefit from permitting, but not subsidizing, much higher densities where the market demands it. Given the long life of a neighborhood, however, it will cost too much and take too long to radically or quickly rebuild our cities. We need more than land use changes to deliver immediate sustainability benefits.

We have spent several weeks studying sprawl and found opportunities for building better cities. In the short run, all cities will need to do more than just change their land-use regulations. Cities need to engage the businesses and households that call them home. Our cities need serious discussions about the services residents want and their willingness to pay for them. Those discussions are the foundation for reforming city operations to improve municipal effectiveness and save money today.

Qualities of Traditional Neighborhoods

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The term sprawl is too vague for applied policy work. As we discovered previously, there are different degrees of sprawl. We recommend that it is better to consider the traditional neighborhood as the benchmark for local policy. Then we can compare how a community differs from that standard. In our work, Axianomics is focusing on the qualities that make a neighborhood traditional. These qualities can me measured, but this kind of careful, detailed measurement at the neighborhood level has seldom been completed. As a reminder, a traditional neighborhood is the basic form for U.S. cities up until about the 1920’s. Communities didn’t build a lot during the Great Depression and WWII. After the war, however, the vast majority of new development departed from these following characteristics of traditional neighborhoods:

  • A road system with many interconnections, typically a grid
  • A fine-grained variation in land use (that is, the potential for multiple uses on a single city block, but also on adjacent blocks)
  • Houses in a variety of sizes and number of bedrooms
  • Infrastructure that permits easy walking between land uses

While such a neighborhood can have a high density of buildings per acre, density is only a potential result of these qualities. Build a neighborhood the traditional way and you can reap some of the efficiency benefits of density. In fact, density without these qualities is a recipe for congestion and a low quality of life experience. These four qualities permit a relatively dense neighborhood that is pleasant and that offers privacy and open space to those who want single-family living.

It might be helpful to identify the opposite qualities of a traditional neighborhood. A neighborhood with the following qualities will have a more difficult time delivering the efficiency benefits of density while also producing a high quality of life for residents:

  • A road system with few intersections, often with many cul-de-sacs
  • Large, mutually exclusive zones of uniform land uses
  • Housing that lacks a variety of sizes and number of bedrooms
  • Infrastructure that makes walking between uses difficult (incomplete sidewalks, lack of crosswalks, walls between land use zones)

The figure below is a highly-stylized picture of two neighborhoods that match our definitions. The neighborhood on the top is an extreme deviation from traditional neighborhood qualities. The neighborhood on the bottom meets the four qualities of a traditional neighborhood.

Two Neighborhood Forms

Traditional (Bottom) and Nontraditional Community Forms

Moving from left to right, the top community has five separate zones: a large shopping center with several pad sites, a garden apartment complex, a single-family home subdivision, a school, and a low-rise business park.

The community on the bottom is centered on a cluster of mixed and single-use commercial buildings that accommodate retail, office and sometimes apartments. Structured parking serves car travelers to this district. Small apartment buildings surround the neighborhood commercial core. None of these buildings are over two stories. Single-family homes cover most of the community. These homes include row houses near the larger buildings, and a mix of small townhouses, duplexes and larger houses. The school is integrated into the neighborhood.

The bottom community probably supports a slightly larger population and job base, but on less than half the land of the non-traditional community. It takes very careful analysis to accurately assess the costs and benefits of these two neighborhood types. Next week we till turn to the available research, keeping these neighborhood qualities in mind.

Mixed Income and Housing Variety

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Introduction

After reflection and conversation, I realized the need to clarify a term used in last week’s post. In listing the benefits of traditional neighborhoods, I recommended their ability to support a mix of family incomes. Urban sociologists and poverty researchers mean something very specific when they use the term mixed-income. I actually meant something different and, this week, will clarify and elaborate on the similarities and differences between mixed-income housing and traditional neighborhoods with a variety of housing types.

What Did I Say Last Week?

The relevant section began: “Traditional neighborhoods offer other benefits that strengthen the local economy. This helps households and local government financial stability. These benefits include supporting: competitive industry clusters, mixed-income populations and local businesses.” Later I elaborated with: “Traditional neighborhoods provide a variety of housing types: rental units of all sizes, town houses and single-family homes. This lets a neighborhood accommodate residents at every stage of their life cycle as their incomes and space needs change.”

Variety of House Sizes in a Low Income Neighborhood. Google Streetview.

Variety of House Sizes in a Low Income Neighborhood. Google Streetview.

What Does Mixed-Income Really Mean?

The Mixed Income Research Design Group, a nonprofit of academic researchers, defines mixed-income housing as a deliberate effort to create socioeconomic diversity in a given area. It may apply to a single building, a larger development or an entire neighborhood. Mixed-income housing is a deliberate policy to improve the circumstances of low-income households through economic integration. This is an important objective, but was not the primary focus of the policies I advocated last week.

The benefits of traditional neighborhoods I referenced come exclusively from their physical form. There is nothing incompatible in the two concepts. Indeed, traditional neighborhoods may be the best way to pursue the goals of mixed-income housing policy. My emphasis, however, was on the superiority of traditional neighborhoods in improving the fiscal and economic health of cities compared to alternatives. By offering a variety of housing types and sizes, such neighborhoods should be more sustainable by attracting a healthy mix of households at every stage of life. This contrasts to a subdivision with a single housing type of interest to a narrower range of households. The benefits so far from mixed income housing are perfectly obtainable from a traditional neighborhood form.

Mixed Income Motives and Outcomes

Mixed-income housing improves the lives of poor families, but has not achieved all the intended goals. Mixed-income housing has been delivered by demolishing high-density public housing projects or tenements and replacing them with lower-density structures. The new developments emphasize small apartment buildings or row-houses with open space. There may also be a percentage of units set aside to sell or lease at market rates. These units can attract higher income households to the community and improve the development’s financial performance. The federal Hope VI program has been extensively implemented and studied, as an example.

According to scholars with the Urban Institute, there three main goals for mixed-income housing policy:

  • Racial, ethnic and income integration
  • Improving employment and income for poor families
  • Improving environmental conditions of poor families (housing, neighborhood safety, etc.)

The Urban Institute has also summarized the research on the results of these initiatives. The greatest success has been with improving environmental conditions. Poor families enjoy better housing stock and have access to more retail and other services. They also show improved mental health, probably from a greater sense of safety in the newly designed communities.

Unfortunately, there has been little improvement in integration or building more diverse social networks across income levels. Research shows class remains a powerful barrier. Families at significantly different income levels do not interact in meaningful ways even when living near each other. This probably explains why there are some improvements in employment but no significant increases in income. The assumption was that low-income residents would grow their social networks and therefor improve access to better jobs. Researchers also note that without deliberate skills and education improvements, changing housing does not improve income prospects.

Housing Mix and Traditional Neighborhoods

Traditional neighborhoods are defined by their physical form: street grids, a variety of parcel sizes and a variety of housing unit sizes. Intentional mixed-income communities can meet the definitions of a traditional neighborhood. Given the research on mixed-income housing, a traditional neighborhood will probably attract households that are similar in socioeconomic terms. Since a traditional neighborhood has a variety of housing size units, those units should be accessible at a variety of price points. Smaller units should cost less than larger units. This may allow the entry of relatively lower income families. The range of incomes in a traditional neighborhood will likely be greater than in a typical subdivision. Regardless, traditional neighborhoods can support households throughout their life cycle as their incomes change and their spending changes.

Restoring and building more traditional neighborhoods can improve the overall financial and economic health of a city, which is our primary focus at Axianomics. Traditional neighborhoods are better for families at any income level. A neighborhood that can help families stay in place, but efficiently transition through stages of life will create a great deal of loyalty and stability. It will be a neighborhood of people who pay close attention to local government decisions and who are active in their cities because they feel they have a stake. These are all great things and should be applauded.

Our cities will need something more to help communities increase social connections between income groups. A renewed civic capital seems critical for building more sustainable cities. Later this year we will look closer at that. Next week, however, we will continue our examination of the costs and benefits of different neighborhood forms.

Benefits of Traditional Neighborhoods

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Introduction

Last week we looked at how and when sprawl-type development is a financial burden for cities. Today we consider the economic benefits of an alternative to business-as-usual sprawl. There are many options other than a typical sprawl subdivision beyond dense, high-rise urban living. Today we will focus on one called traditional neighborhoods. The intention is not to critique sprawl verses traditional on aesthetic grounds. Both have merits there. The focus in on the economics.

Traditional Neighborhoods

A traditional neighborhood is still relatively low density in its appearance. It will have a mix of small residential, commercial and institutional buildings sitting on a variety of parcel sizes. Buildings usually look similar from the street because of a uniform height and setback. Closer inspection will reveal a variety of building widths and depths that add variety to the product mix. The mix will also include homes with detached or shared walls. The image below is a Google street view of two neighborhoods this author has lived in. It nicely captures the distinctions that matter for our discussion today.

The top picture is a traditional neighborhood built in the 1920s in Richmond Virginia. Notice the variety of building types on the same block. To the right, you can see single family row houses. On the left, you can see a small multifamily building. The same street includes smaller row houses, detached mini-mansions and a corner convenience store / market. Some of the homes have garage apartments on the back alley.

The bottom image, a 1970s Dallas Texas subdivision, is a typical single-family home neighborhood with detached houses, rear entry garages and nice front yards occupying the setback from the road. Curb-loaded sidewalks border each street. Nearly all these homes have identical configurations: four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a two-car garage.

Subdivision vs. Traditional Neighborhood

Subdivision vs. Traditional Neighborhood

Both neighborhoods are green, attractive and in high demand. Both can easily be considered suburban, compared to the dense, high-rise living advocated by many sprawl haters. Both are relatively easy to build and can be created with modern construction techniques. Prices will depend on the overall supply and demand. Interestingly, in many cities, the traditional neighborhood homes fetch higher prices implying that the market could support more of these products. Also, as we pointed out last week, traditional and subdivision neighborhoods can decline. There are run-down examples of both in most cities. Traditional neighborhoods do have some economic and financial benefits, however.

Private Benefits of Traditional Neighborhoods

Traditional neighborhood homes are generally on smaller lots. This reduces per unit costs. They use less land. Given standard construction practices, homes on these smaller lots also require smaller foundations and roofs. That lowers construction and maintenance costs. Developers install a little less utility infrastructure because of the shorter setbacks. For many households, living in this kind of neighborhood permits them to reduce the number of cars they own. Households will tend to drive each car they own less in these neighborhoods.

Public Sector Benefits

Transit services can cover traditional neighborhoods at a lower cost since more people are a short walk to the bus lines. City infrastructure maintenance costs are lower because local government inherits a smaller infrastructure inventory with a traditional neighborhood. Public services such as police and, especially fire protection, can be more efficiently delivered given the higher household and business density per acre. Neighborhood security is improved from visibility of the street from close-set buildings and higher pedestrian traffic. Other services such as libraries and parks can draw on a larger population in walking distance. More frequent, smaller parks can be smaller and easier to maintain and can sometimes even provided by the neighborhood itself since it serves a limited market.

Benefits to the Local Economy

Traditional neighborhoods offer other benefits that strengthen the local economy. This helps households and local government financial stability. These benefits include supporting: competitive industry clusters, mixed-income populations and local businesses.

Cities with a traditional neighborhood form can accommodate clusters of businesses in related industries in a small area. Historically, the private sector took advantage of this by quickly establishing districts for the various trades and manufacturers. The proximity of similar businesses lower the costs of securing workers, suppliers and customers. Proximity also supports innovation because spontaneous interaction of these entrepreneurs and workers in the neighborhood permits the rapid exchange of ideas. Today, highly competitive clusters of technology startups, designers, and other high-end services thrive in traditional neighborhoods for these reasons. This gives their home cities a competitive advantage.

Traditional neighborhoods provide a variety of housing types: rental units of all sizes, town houses and single-family homes. This lets a neighborhood accommodate residents at every stage of their life cycle as their incomes and space needs change. People can enter a community as young singles in studio apartments. Then they can start a family in a larger apartment or buy a home. When it is time to downsize, options are available. All survey evidence indicates that people generally want to age in place once they pick a neighborhood. Typical subdivisions with a single housing type are prone to booms and busts as the founding generation seeks more affordable options in their later years. Some of these subdivisions recover, some don’t. Traditional neighborhoods thus offer cities a more stable tax base compared to single-product subdivisions.

Finally, traditional neighborhoods support small-scale mom and pop businesses. They offer a variety of building types and many households in walking distance without the need for expensive parking. Most traditional neighborhoods support small clusters of retail with professional services, bars, restaurants, markets, repair shops, etc. These may occupy some or all four corners of an occasional intersection – not every corner. Scattered, lone commercial buildings are also typically available for businesses in these neighborhoods. These sites often are focal points for surrounding households.

The arguments here are not meant to say traditional neighborhoods are better in every case. Survey research varies, but there appears to still be a strong preference for single family homes. This product can easily be accommodated in traditional neighborhood form. Our argument is that cities have given up many economic benefits by changing their building and land use regulations to facilitate subdivision sprawl. Today, there is a growing market for traditional neighborhoods but city ordinances often make this form illegal to build. This is unfortunate because these economic benefits go right to the bottom line of private and public decision makers. What to do? We certainly can’t abandon eighty percent of our housing stock and build entirely new neighborhoods all at once. In the following weeks, we will look further at the costs and benefits of traditional and sprawl neighborhoods and at how communities can make changes that will put them on a more fiscally sustainable path.

Land Use and Fiscal Stress

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Introduction

This is the first of two posts to consider land use in the context of fiscal stress. Land use and the way cities are built has received a lot of attention, especially from planners and architects. Today we will look beyond some of the typical “costs of sprawl” arguments. The reality is that suburban-type development may or may not be a fiscal strain on a community. It depends on some broader economic forces at play.

Land Use Defined

Land use is not the same thing as zoning. Zoning regulations identify the permissible uses for a piece of property called a parcel. Land use is what is happing at this moment on that parcel. That could be, for example: single family residential, retail, manufacturing or agriculture uses. Zoning may allow many different uses. What may be more important for the fiscal implications of land use are the ways an activity takes place on a parcel and the way the supporting buildings and infrastructure are positioned and built on the parcel.

Land Use as a Source of Fiscal Stress

When we hear someone mention that sprawling development is costly for they are singling out what most of us would recognize as suburban land uses. The argument is that this type of development brings higher costs for local government than urban land uses. Suburban development patterns provide for fewer buildings per acre because of the need to accommodate the movement and parking of automobiles. This land use pattern also reduces building density with requirements that buildings be set back a minimum distance from the property line for aesthetic or safety reasons.

No doubt this pattern of development requires more public infrastructure per private building (say single family homes.) They need more linear feet of water pipes, storm drains, streets. Longer streets require more street lights and so on. There will be more infrastructure to maintain and eventually replace.

There can also be higher operating costs for general city services such as police and fire protection. The police department will need more vehicles to patrol the more spread out area. More fire stations will be need to be built, staffed and provided with trucks to maintain an adequate response time in a less densely built environment.

Whether a city with this type of land use is or will experience fiscal stress because of the higher infrastructure and operating costs depends on local market conditions. If the private buildings are valued high enough, then they will support the property taxes that are needed to maintain the greater burden. Some low-density or sprawling neighborhoods represent a severe burden for a city while others may be a net contributor to municipal coffers. It all depends.

When Sprawl Might Matter: Right Side of Town

A sprawling neighborhood becomes a problem for municipal finances when there is insufficient demand for those communities. The condition of the overall metropolitan or citywide market and specific submarkets make all the difference. On the macro level, metropolitan areas face different degrees of demand by households and businesses. This can depend on the health of local businesses, amenities and levels of services among other things. Cities with less overall demand will have a harder time supporting a lot of higher cost suburban development. Cities in high demand will find it easier.

Within an urban area, the location of the neighborhood can make a great difference in overall demand. The problem is that in most metro areas, only a fraction of the neighborhoods are in high demand. This has been referred to as the favored quarter concept.

The idea is that the high-demand, and hence, high-value neighborhoods tend to be all on the same side of the traditional downtown and they then to be clustered into about 1/4th of the overall city. In Dallas, this quarter is on the north side. In Houston, it is to the west of downtown. In Fort Worth, it is on the southwest side. A series of interesting maps showing favored quarters across the U.S. is found here.

For individual suburbs it can make all the difference in the world where they happen to be located. One group of former farming communities will inherit the good fortune of being in the path of the ever-expanding favored quarter. These suburbs will have an easier time, overall maintain infrastructure and services because of their higher-demand properties. Sprawl may be sustainable for some of these cities indefinitely. That is, if they are not someday passed by for even newer communities further out in the favored quarter. Sprawl has the most devastating impact on suburbs that are on the “wrong” side of a metropolitan area. They may not be able to sustain their existing suburban infrastructure and municipal services once their original neighborhoods begin to decline in value (become less appealing on the market.)

For central cities, they generally include the full spectrum of these suburban neighborhoods. It is an empirical question whether the central city’s favored quarter can support the infrastructure and service needs of the entire city. This often motivates cities to attempt redevelopment projects that increase demand for lower-end neighborhoods. Gentrification often follows.

When Sprawl Might Matter: Density

There are also degrees of sprawl. Across the nation, there is a clear difference in residential density in the suburban parts of cities. Generally, the further west one goes, especially in the sunbelt, the denser the neighborhoods are. This reflects the changing climate across that vaste region. In the Southeast, there is more leap-frog development with large open spaces maintained between subdivisions and larger lot sizes. In the Southwest, home lot-sizes are much smaller in relation to house size. Suburban densities are four times higher in cities like Phoenix or Los Angeles than they are in Atlanta or Raleigh. Texas cities have suburban densities that are somewhere in between. All things being equal, these different densities require different amounts of infrastructure to serve. This means there will be differing costs for these regions at least when it comes to infrastructure There is not a lot of data on differences in service costs when we have different types of suburbanization.

A final fact to consider is that we have examples across the country of failed neighborhoods with every type of residential land use: high-rise tenements, brownstone row houses and single family home neighborhoods. All these having fallen into decay and abandonment, usually for some of the macro-level market conditions we listed above. For that reason, we need to look beyond the simple arguments that suburban sprawl is unsustainable. It certainly is less sustainable, but that relative qualifier makes all the difference for specific cities.

Next week, we take a slightly different angle on the costs of sprawl by considering the economic benefits cities give up when they switch from more urban to more suburban neighborhood patterns.