Plan About Town
A while back I was at dinner with my family, and somehow we started discussing my mother’s intention to move out of Philadelphia in a few years. I was surprised to hear each of my siblings talk about how much they love the neighborhood we grew up in (and all live in at the moment). What surprised me was that even though I don’t really recall discussing it much with them, their reasons echoed my own — the area isn’t too crowded with automobile traffic, there are fields and trees around, and many of the stores are within walking distance. This quasi-suburbia has almost accidentally lucked into many, although not all, of the features advocated by a movement called ‘new urbanism,’ a group of urban planners and community activists working in conjunction with environmental advocates and others to combat America’s decades-long push to the suburbs.
The main argument of new urbanism is that the way we have developed our cities and suburbs over the last fifty years has been horribly inefficient, costly in both financial and psychological terms. Because the things we need and the places we go are so spread out, we spend much more time driving than before, which means we spend less time in our communities forging bonds with our neighbors or establishing an emotional connection to the area. When we do stay at home, we have fewer options for what we can do, because zoning laws and the desire for lots of living space means that the critical mass of restaurants, shops and other businesses can’t form.
Of course, whether those entail actual sacrifices is to an extent up to the individual. I can’t imagine myself not living in a city; as I’ve said elsewhere, I loved the energy that came with living in New York City, and I sometimes even harbor thoughts of moving farther into Philadelphia than Pattie and I are now. But that’s me; someone else might like solitude or quiet and find city life horrible, and I’m not about to argue that. What new urbanites and anti-sprawl advocates have increasingly pointed out, however, is that physical expansion hurts us in the pocketbook. Setting up a new housing development means that the hosting municipality will have to deliver services to that development — gas, power and sewer utilities, police, fire and emergency services, trash collection, schools, and so on. The existing local population pays for those services through increased taxes, reduced services, or both, because the developers and new residents rarely, if ever, compensate a community for the new revenue demands it creates.
The Sierra Club has a number of sprawl-related resources, including the 2000 report Sprawl Costs Us All which provides examples of the costs of development. The report should make us rethink the attitude that cities should do whatever is required to bring in businesses and residents, under the assumption that the subsidies will eventually pay for themselves. A Denver suburb expect to spend between $2.25 and $2.7 billion to hook up a sewer line to a 90-home development on the outskirts of the town. According to the report, “the average new home in Arvada will bring in only $1,293 per year in property taxes. Even if all of the new residents’ property taxes were spent paying for the sewer, there would still be a shortfall of well over $2 million.” That’s just the start. Spring Hill, Tennesse spent $5 million more on sewer hookups to the Saturn plant than it received in impact fees. And these are just the utilities. Some of the other costs in the report make you just shake your head.
How did we get here? In part, I’m sure it’s the way we depict the American Dream, moving up to bigger houses and more space. My parents grew up in rowhomes in Northeast Philadelphia. They moved to a twin house at the edge of the city to raise my siblings and me, with an eye towards a single home in the suburbs. For a long time that was my minimum standard for success, and I’ve seen that drive operate on friends and family as well. But the policies we set on the national and local level probably have more to do with it. The income tax deduction for home mortgage interest has made homebuilding and homebuying a major segment of the economy. Factor in the weighting of transportation funding to highway and roads construction rather than extensive mass transit and you have a system that rewards sprawl. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. As a matter of necessity, New York City demonstrates what a mass transit system can achieve. You don’t need a car to function in New York. You can make a day of walking through the neighborhoods, finding new things to do and experience. It seems ironic to me that one of the largest, busiest cities in the world is one that also features such fertile ground for communities to flourish.
New York is far from the only community out there, of course. The New Urban News’ outline of the ‘new urbanism’ describes a number of small-town developments that have used intelligent planning to achieve a neighborhood feel. Some of these success stories are taking place within underdeveloped urban areas, where developers are taking advantage of vacant lots and destroying unused buildings in order to rebuild and reuse the existing space, providing new hope that America’s older cities will be able to revitalize themselves. The Philadelphia Daily News recently reported that a number of retailers, after years of preferring to build in the suburbs, are setting up their large ‘box’ stores in downtown Philly and even in some of the neighborhoods. So it’s not an impossible dream.
There are a number of sites devoted to sprawl and urban-planning issues; Yahoo! has a page devoted to them. I recommend Sprawl Watch, Sustainable Minnesota (which provides a useful amount of detail on a single area) and Smart Growth Online.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.