Dense Thinkers

"New Urbanism," the latest fad in urban planning, promises less traffic, better air, and lower taxes. Here's what it really delivers.

Randal O'Toole from the January 1999 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Dirty air is also a function of density, which promotes the concentration of dangerous levels of pollutants. The EPA rates urban air pollution as extreme, serious, moderate, marginal, and none. Not surprisingly, the worst pollution is found in the urban areas with the densest populations (see chart). Thus, the New Urban prescription of increased density with few new roads doubly increases urban air pollution.

Sprawling Costs

Worsened air quality is a price New Urbanists apparently are willing to pay. But when it comes to what they call "the costs of sprawl," they're not so generous. As with most of their core beliefs, New Urbanist cost analyses of suburban development rely more on faith than on empirical data. Hence, a 1974 Council on Environmental Quality report arguing that low-density development imposed higher costs for urban services--roads, sewers, schools, and the like--than higher densities remains a holy text among the New Urbanist faithful. That the document was based entirely on speculative and unverified estimates doesn't seem important; neither does the fact that numerous studies since that time have found that taxes and urban service costs are actually higher in high-density areas.

A 1992 Duke University study, for example, analyzed data from 247 counties that contain well over half the population of the United States. The researchers found that, above a density of 250 people per square mile (which is a rural density), costs rose as densities increased. In fact, urban service costs in areas of 24,000 people per square mile--a density typical of the core of older cities such as Philadelphia and Boston--were nearly 50 percent greater than in areas of 250 people per square mile.

But even if a new high-density development did impose lower costs than a low-density development, it does not follow that it costs less to rebuild a low-density suburb to high densities than it would to simply build a new low-density suburb. That's because infrastructure such as sewers, water, roads, and schools are built for the densities they serve. Suddenly doubling densities means tearing up streets for utilities, widening roads (or increasing congestion), and buying land for new schools.

Residents of San Diego know all about that. In 1980, the city adopted a New Urban plan that discouraged development outside of an urban ring and promoted "infill" development in the core area ("infill" is the development of vacant lots and redevelopment of existing residential areas to higher densities.) Ten years later, the sewage system was regularly breaking down, traffic congestion had significantly increased, and the city estimated that it needed $1 billion to bring urban infrastructure up to its 1980 levels. Ironically, the Sierra Club cited San Diego as one of the nation's worst examples of sprawl.

In a related way, New Urbanists get it backward when it comes to housing and living costs: Policies they think will lead to cheaper housing and living costs actually make things more expensive. In low-density cities such as Houston and Minnesota's Twin Cities, land represents a tiny fraction of the value of a home. In higher-density cities, it's common for land to account for half or more of the value of a home. This means that people of a given income level in a high-density city can afford less house than they might buy in a low-density area. That's one reason why the suburbs are so popular--you tend to get more house (and property) for the money.

The same basic economic reality affects retailing as well. A major reason why megastores and supermarkets gravitate to the outskirts of areas is that land is cheaper and allows for bigger buildings. The New Urbanist dream of shopping at a corner market may be quaint, but it ignores two basic things people look for in stores: good prices and a wide selection of products, neither of which is characteristic of small shops (as any inner-city grocery shopper will tell you). Stores get bigger when they can serve more people. When they get bigger, they can offer a greater variety of products, fresher produce, and lower prices than small stores. Corner grocery stores might serve the occasional emergency need for a quart of milk or six-pack of beer. But most people will do most of their shopping where choices are greater and costs are lower--which means that they will shop by car.

In spite of New Urbanist claims, such residential and retailing mobility hasn't led to unchecked sprawl. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 95 percent of the lower 48 states remains undeveloped. In fact, the vast majority of Americans live in the less than 3 percent of the country that is urbanized (defined by the Census Bureau as more than 1,000 people per square mile). The only open spaces that are truly threatened are golf courses, u-pick farms, and large suburban backyards. All are targeted by New Urbanists for "infill" development. Portland is even selling park lands at discount prices to entice developers into building high-density apartments.

The Congestion Coalition

Despite its theoretical and practical failings, the New Urbanism is quietly sweeping the nation. Portland's Metro recently passed the most restrictive plan ever adopted for a U.S. city. The legislatures of Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington have enacted "smart growth" or "growth management" laws, both New Urbanist euphemisms. Pressure groups in Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Tampa, and other cities are demanding and getting New Urbanist plans for their communities. If you live in a metropolitan area, your city planning bureau is probably infested with New Urbanists.

This success is all the more remarkable given the manifest and widely recognized failure of grand, utopian planning schemes. As Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) showed, the urban renewal movement in the 1950s and '60s destroyed living communities and replaced them with sterile monuments to human arrogance. In Nowhere to Go (1988), Fuller Torrence credibly blames much of the homeless problem on planners who demolished the low-income apartments where many of these people lived. Planners also created many of the public housing disasters of the past few decades. The history of urban planning is a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.

How do the New Urbanists respond to the failure of their forebears? They not only admit that past planners made mistakes, they themselves blame most urban ills on previous generations of planners. Their perverse, if savvy, solution is to give planners more power, so they can correct past mistakes through even stronger rules and regulations.

New Urbanist supporters include planners, environmentalists, federal bureaucrats, central city officials, downtown businesses, and construction companies. Their motivations range from idealism to economic self-interest, but all have a stake in maintaining or rebuilding tightly packed urban cores. Together, they also have the clout to get things done.

Planners and environmentalists are among the idealists in what can be dubbed the "congestion coalition." Recognizing that traffic congestion is one of the major concerns of urban residents, most New Urbanist planners no doubt think their convoluted approach will eventually alleviate the situation. (To put a more cynical spin on their designs, they can at least rest assured that increases in congestion caused by their plans will lead to calls for more planners.) Environmentalists' idealism is less concerned with urban quality of life per se than with preserving what they see as pristine wilderness; New Urbanist nostrums of denser urban areas and less automobile usage are means to that end.