The End Of Edge City?

by Stowe Boyd

Gas prices are forcing a reverse migration, as suburbanites are reconsidering the car culture lifestyle:

[from Gas Prices May Revive Cities - US News and World Report by Bret Schulte]

On one hand, the story of the car, and the far-flung communities of huge homes and cul-de-sacs they enabled, is a testament to America's enormous economic success. But it has also meant more obesity, pollution, and, say urban planners, social isolation. They argue that in some ways, the quality of life was higher when Americans had less money to purchase things like cars. "The great cities that people love," [Andres] Duany says, "were the result of a substantially less wealthy nation that had to be far more intelligent about its assets." He notes cities such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, which were built for people to live close to their daily needs. A fringe benefit: more opportunities for interaction with and reliance on neighbors.

High energy prices could mean more U.S. cities joining those ranks, growing thicker with residents, shops, and employers—as they were decades ago. Together with the foreclosure crisis, gas prices "will really take the sheen off the distant suburbs," says Bob Dunphy, a senior fellow for transportation and infrastructure at the Urban Land Institute. Experts are predicting that city homes, often smaller than their suburban counterparts, could gain value for being less costly to heat and cool, as well as for their proximity to mass transit, shops, and employers. "It's what I call a return to reason," Duany says.

The obstacles to such a retro future, of course, are staggering. Thriving cities are expensive and cramped and hardly family friendly. Shrinking cities, like many in the Rust Belt, are dilapidated, crime-ridden—and hardly family friendly. Few offer a quality public school system. But the biggest changes would have to take place in the suburbs. New Urbanists such as Duany, who champion mixed-use environments, say suburbs must adapt to high gas prices by becoming more like villages. Central shopping should replace big box stores (and their aprons of parking) on the town edge. And entire swaths of city blocks with nothing but houses and cul-de-sacs must be retrofitted to fully functioning neighborhoods, with corner stores and businesses in walking distance. "Communities will have to look at diversifying their land use," says Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "You'll see more people buying into the idea of a more dense suburb." Public transit would have to not only link to the metropolitan core but to other suburbs, which often have their own employer bases.

More densely population near suburbs -- where near may be defined by access to high speed metropolitan mass transit -- and a return of the affluent to the core cities will likely upend decades of movement in the opposit direction. The near term impacts will be an increase in the property values of core cities and near suburbs, and a sharp decline in edge city housing and property values. This means, among other trends, the poor will be forced out of the city and will move to the rapidly devalued edges.

Other changes? As the wealthy begin to move into the cities, you can expect that mass transportation will improve, and quickly. And less money will be directly to roads and highways, which were the magic carpet on which sprawl flew in on:

[from Gas Prices Apply Brakes To Suburban Migration - washingtonpost.com]

Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.

The policies -- building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways -- have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.

But there's been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.

Get ready for a quick turn, and a trip back downtown. Urban flight will mean a return to the cities by the well-to-do, moving out of McMansions and SUVs, living in apartments and riding bikes to work.

A secondary impact will mean that we'll be tearing down abandoned, foreclosed buildings in the exurbs and far suburbs, and turning them into farms. And teaching the new dispossessed -- the former urban poor -- how to raise food for themselves, and the city dwellers, as well.

Resources

groundling: Andres Duany, DPZ, well-known for his New Theory Of Urnabism article (Scientific American, December 2000), and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Comments

[Dave]

Good, interesting stuff Stowe.

I think though the world still needs to take a look at the changing nature of work an how society is, or more likely isn't, changing to accomodate that. It seems the focus still is on moving people to jobs that needn't be centralised still in this day and age. Rather than move the people central move the work to the edge. Generally I think overall we are still too rooted in industrial age thinking and processes.

Point taken though. And a very good point at that.

Dave - Lifekludger

[Stowe Boyd]

Its more of a density issue. Living and working in the same locale decreases transport and related costs, including carbon, traffic accidents, and so on. Moving work from core cities to the edge has led to sprawl, and in the US, at least, social policies that favor highways over train-based mass transit.

Given the situation we have at this moment, people are going to respond to gas prices by moving closer to the core. Collectively that will lead to a really significant change from the status quo ante, and any increase in oil prices will accelerate this trend. Likewise, the costs of heating or cooling larger houses will lead to people opting to downsize, just as they are doing with their cars.

Companies might become more tolerant of telecommuting and timeshifting work, but they will also opt to move closer to mass transit, as a general benefit to employees.

These factors will almost immediately lead to a reversal of urban flight in the next few years, long before regional governments will rally to create significant new mass transit, aside from adding additional trains and buses to existing routes. Only subsequently will we see high-density urban planning outside the core cities in any large degree. It's simply easier to repopulate the core cities, although it will lead to a reversal of the trends we have seen in the past 50 years toward suburbanization.