Why is it that we have single-use zoning that's very restrictive? Because that's what planners told us was the right way to do things. Now they've said that's not such a good idea after all -- that it's a good idea to allow some types of small retail scattered in and amongst retail areas on major streets. Well, if you go to Houston you find that: On the major streets you have retail, and on the side streets and back areas you have the housing developments. Sometimes people in Houston can in fact walk to shop. And they did it without some planner in the city government telling them, "Oh, you should put some stores close to the houses." It turns out that's such a good idea that a developer got rich doing that. So what's ironic is that some of the current, cutting-edge New Urbanist ideas have been in place in Houston for years without the intervention of the planning profession.
The other thing that's frustrating is, if you read a lot of planners' critiques of what they refer to as urban sprawl, they're completely focused on the present. You would think a profession called planning would be concerned with the evolution and transition of areas. But they aren't. They'll look at a situation where a few houses have been built, and they'll say that's sprawl. Well, perhaps. Or perhaps over the next 10 or 20 years there's going to be further infill development there -- if it's allowed by the local land-use controls -- and in fact what they're seeing is a city in construction. As a country, we're growing in population. Those people have to go someplace. And they're not all going to go there at once.
So we have to think about not just land use at a particular point in time, but where we're going. Areas change, and a lot of the problems we have in redevelopment are self-inflicted because of the type of land use regime that we've imposed on ourselves.
reason: Of course, it's all the rage in some cities to do a 20-year forecast -- which never matches where the development ends up appearing.
Bogart: The real urban planning is sewers and highways. That part of urban planning is, to a large extent, competent civil engineering. So you have to do that. What I'm objecting to in these 20-year plans is the planner saying, "The apartments are going to be over here, the houses are going to be over here, and the stores are going to be over here." And then 10 years later, when someone wants to build apartments where the store was going to be, or worse try to redevelop a store into apartments, they have to move heaven and earth to make it possible. If the infrastructure's there, and if people want to do it, then why not let them?
reason: It's usually acknowledged today that downtowns are losing their status as the center of the city. You write that this process has been going on for longer than is usually assumed.
Bogart: It began with the invention of mass transit in the early 1800s. It accelerated in the early 1900s with the invention of the car and especially the truck, because manufacturing was able to get out of downtown. Manufacturing wanted to get out of downtown, and everyone else downtown wanted manufacturing gone too, because it's noisy, it's smelly -- there's all kinds of problems. So the manufacturers were able to leave, and that has let the downtowns adjust from being everything to being a certain set of things.
I allude in the chapter on downtowns to a book by Jean Gottman called Megalopolis, where he identifies some specific special roles that downtowns play. One of the things that completely frustrates me is that a lot of people cite the word "megalopolis" but haven't read Gottman's book. It's an incredible book. If a lot of planners would read it and think about it, they probably wouldn't cite it the way that they do.
reason: What's good about it?
Bogart: He looks at the long-run changes that are going on and tries to understand them. The reason no one reads it is it's about 800 pages. He talks about the growth of activities over 200 years on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Among other things, he has very thoughtful discussions about how farmland transitions into being urban. A lot of the forests that people are bemoaning the loss of, for example, only became forests relatively recently. Before that they were cornfields. But they were inefficient cornfields. Forests were a good way to hold them until they could actually be redeveloped.
Again, what we're seeing is a long-range transition from rural to urban. Rather than just object to that, Gottman tries to understand both the cause and what the real costs and benefits are.
reason: You also argue that mass transit is a historical anomaly.
Bogart: Essentially, people are willing to trade off the inconvenience of mass transit only if there's enough speed in return. There was a very short period of time when technologically that was feasible, and it dated from the late 1800s until about 1930. Mass transit, and particularly large-scale fixed-rail transit, really only makes sense where you have the type of highly dense employment and highly dense residences that are very rare in the United States. So building some of these light rail lines from place to place -- it takes too long to build them, not as many people ride them as were projected to ride them, and it's much more expensive and less effective than almost anything else that you could do.
The other problem with mass transit is it is really inflexible.
reason: Or at least fixed-rail transit is inflexible.
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