Malignant 'Burbs

Abiola notes a report which purports to show that suburban sprawl shortens your life and attempts to define an opposition to sprawl based on free-market principles:

..but one thing that is rarely noted is that it is the very existence of poorly thought through policies that has done so much to foster the sprawl in the first place: in particular, the ubiquitous zoning restrictions on what can be built where. Although opposition to sprawl is often seen as a left-wing issue, there is nothing dirigiste about wishing to tear down regulations that encourage unhealthy, unwalkable and highly socially-stratified developments.

It would be nice to think that this is the case but my guess is that the market tends to strongly favour suburban sprawl and under a laissez faire approach to zoning you would see strikingly similar development emerge. The big issue is car use, and this is often misunderstood by the type of people who disparage big-box retailing such as Daniel Davies. If you have a (young) family and you don't own a car it is because either

a) you can't (practically*) afford one.

b) you are determined for political reasons to avoid car use.

If I was in any doubt about this before this month, it was made forcefully clear to me attempting to transport my kids around Rome. It is certainly possible to make your way around a city with young children by foot, public transport and taxi. It is even possible to do some light shopping, from groceries to veblen goods. It's just that at best it's not very pleasant and at worst it's a major inconvenience.

Once you have a car, the negative aspects of suburban sprawl - nothing much within walking distance, potentially** longer commute, are easily outweighed by the positives - cheaper, larger homes with gardens.

Personally, I find higher density development more aesthetically appealing and I prefer to be able to walk to the shop/pub/restaurant but I think there is a lot of wishful thinking by people, of the same aesthetic tastes as mine, who prefer not to recognise the popularity of such development.

Peter Gordon's blog is a good reference for a look at development and planning issues from an economically liberal point of view, a few short thoughts on sprawl and health arehere.

*Car use may be unaffordable to otherwise affluent individuals in certain cities due to additional costs related to parking.

** Not necessarily always the case.

Comments

[Abiola Lapite]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

One thing your analysis fails to note, however: those massive edge-of-town malls are largely made possible through intensively subsidized road building and maintenance, especially in the United States, where there is also rarely any attempt to seriously make car-users internalize the the environmental costs of their choice of transportation.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) - GPGshell v3.10
Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL:
Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt

iD8DBQFBWdjeOgWD1ZKzuwkRAoStAJ4njGMB9WWkCJUB/ZaopldN2OLZNQCdEsHa
ZmZpHd1gpeqg8ZniI4ZV7Ew=
=pllV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Abiola Lapite]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

By the way, I find Peter Gordon's dismissal of the RAND study glib. There is nothing far-fetched about the connection between sprawl and obesity - I've seen it myself in American suburbs in which sidewalks are no more than an afterthought, and one walks at one's peril.

It is also not at all ridiculous to mention that the health effects of sprawl can cost one years of life expectancy, even if said expectancy is still on the rise for both suburb and city dwellers. If life expectancy rises for both from (74 yrs, 78 yrs) to (76 yrs, 80 yrs), where's the contradiction in that?

If anyone's blinded by ideology here, it's Gordon.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) - GPGshell v3.10
Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL:
Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt

iD8DBQFBWdpyOgWD1ZKzuwkRAtKPAJ0RxF/uSNZegGAUOS9XhB3Qs8T3qQCfUbJn
SIbDNGzyJIkLAwTAtgCjA3Q=
=Qpy9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Frank McGahon]

Well, Gordon didn't claim to offer a complete rebuttal but rather simply announced his scepticism.

those massive edge-of-town malls are largely made possible through intensively subsidized road building and maintenance, especially in the United States, where there is also rarely any attempt to seriously make car-users internalize the the environmental costs of their choice of transportation.

This is rather begging the question that suburban roads are significantly more expensive to maintain than urban environments. In any case, I do agree that road use is really inefficiently priced, although the effects of this phenomenon are most acute, as it turns out, in city centres - hence London's congestion charge.

[Abiola Lapite]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

But given the much higher population densities in cities, the cost per head of road maintenance is still likely to be lower, even if the absolute value expended on it is higher. In fact, one can make the argument that the congestion witnessed in inner cities is no more than a sign of higher capacity utilization; the Japanese experience with tolls on intercity express roads, most of which end up severely underutilized because of their cost, also argues for the idea that metropolitan roads are actually less of a financial drain on a per capita use basis.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) - GPGshell v3.10
Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL:
Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt

iD8DBQFBWeTlOgWD1ZKzuwkRAsx0AJ4nz38x9xDqE19oI6DuXoBtZhdQmwCfYCnt
7e8fcXUgW3IXp8SY1hcUc1s=
=FdGw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Frank McGahon]

You're not going to find any disagreement from me about the way roads are funded - indeed this is yet another thing Hayek referred to in the Road to Serfdom, the 1930s autobahns carred hardly more traffic than the typical English country road. The point is that the contemporary US method of funding roadbuilding is generally the same as, say, the typical European method, yet you see different development patterns. Suburbs are significantly more dispersed in America than Europe. Of course, motor fuel is a lot more expensive in Europe but I think you see the effects of this in the types of cars which are popular - I'd even guess that the cost of fuel per hour of driving is similar. SUV drivers "waste" the benefit of cheaper fuel in lower efficiency - The most salient difference between the typical European burb and the American burb is that planning tends to be more restricted on this side of the atlantic. My guess is that the more dispersed suburbs is a reflection, among other factors, of a freer market in housing rather than a more restricted one. I suspect you'd find it hard to demonstrate that tighter urban densities would emerge in a laissez-faire system.

[Frank McGahon]

Also: see the Jane Galt piece I link to in the following post which links to a NYT article exploding various myths of "smart growth" including:

Drivers are getting a free ride.

Yes, the government spends a lot more money on highways than transit, but most of that money comes out of the drivers' pockets. If you add up the costs of driving -- the car owner's costs as well as the public cost of building and maintaining highways and local streets, the salaries of police patrolling the roads -- it works out to about 20 cents per passenger mile, and drivers pay more than 19 of those cents, according to Cox. A trip on a local bus or commuter train costs nearly four times as much, and taxpayers subsidize three-quarters of that cost.

[Brian]

"the market tends to strongly favour suburban sprawl"

Considering the fact that sprawl is made possible by inefficient infrastructure expansion subsidized by the tax base as a whole, it's hard to say at all what the market would tend to favor.

[Brian]

In the US, gas tax revenues only account for about 60% of the total cost of road/bridge construction and maintenance. Guess where the other 40% comes from?

As for public transportation, the public may subsidize some of the cost, but it's counterbalanced by the fact that 40 people on one bus has less of a negative impact on the environment and the state of the roads that 40 people each taking their own car.

I don't mind the public as a whole subsidizing public transportation because, as I suggest above, we're already highways.

[Brian]

"Guess where the other 40% comes from?"

Sorry I didn't complete this thought.

I meant to add:

The general fund, of course.

I didn't want anything thinking I was implying that solely non-drivers pay for it. Although we do, of course, subsidize it in part.