The Suburban Solution

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Suburban Solution

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Cicero posted:

The blog Strong Towns also talks about how a lot of neighborhoods in America were built with an unsustainable growth pattern where the tax revenues generated can't cover the service/repair/replacement cost of the infrastructure (sprawl increases the amount of infrastructure per person without increasing the tax base): http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

This is what got talked about a lot in my city management and urban planning classes. Kyle, TX is a good example - they were having big problems funding their government because residential development doesn't pay for itself. So they starting zoning huge blocks of greenfield as commercial to attract big box retailers for the sales tax revenue. It's interesting in a way because although they're diversifying their development, I would say that having massive big box stores (Cabela's, HEB, etc.) and strip malls right on the side of the highway somehow made them seem even more suburban.

boner confessor posted:

suburbs become a patchwork of wealthy and poor jurisdictions. just ban the construction of apartments (refuse to zone multifamily dwellings) and problem solved. this is the single biggest reason for minimum lot requirements in residential zoning, it becomes a defacto poor tax to live in an area. well gee it's not our fault you can't afford a house and property taxes on a half acre lot

This is something we might have seen progress on if Hillary had won. Obama's HUD has been pushing a progressive angle on relaxation of zoning rules as fair housing (see here). Probably all hosed now though.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 03:09

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 10:05

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

boner confessor posted:

i can verify myself, badger of basra, and stichensis as bona fide urban planning thing knowers to field any questions about how it works

please though these threads always become dumb slapfights about how living in cities/suburbs is good/bad and you're cool/stupid for living there/not living there so please none of that idiocy thanks

Plz, I am just a city bureaucrat. I did take a bunch of planning classes during my MPA through and might try to move into planning.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 03:12

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

sitchensis posted:

This shot is from Back to the Future which was filmed in 1985.

30 years later, aside from some minor cosmetic changes and some trees, literally nothing about the built environment in that shot has changed.

So yes, suburban sprawl is here to stay. The problem is, it doesn't go away, it doesn't pay for itself, and it will be enormously expensive to maintain. So, how does it get fixed? That's a big thorny question.

I'm going to print this out and show it to everyone at work.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 03:36

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Furnaceface posted:

Its more about the type of housing we build and density as far as I can tell? Its a huge part of the burbs since, as you pointed out, it relies heavily on owning a vehicle.

Can we add whats missing to existing areas or is that something that has to be done from the start?

It can be added if your city council is willing. Most aren't. Obama's HUD might have eventually found a way to force them using the Fair Housing Act but rip.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 03:40

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

boner confessor posted:

oh, no, this is one of the easiest things to fix in suburbs because you can fix it one building at a time. it's actually pretty organic to take a big old house that nobody can afford to live in and split it into three different units. or knock down some houses and put up duplexes/triplexes/condos/whatever. the big problem here is jurisdictional fragmentation and single use zoning or monozoning

jurisdictional fragmentation is a particularly american problem. basically, the police power and the ability to determine land use is only a hundred some odd years old. before then you could build anything wherever unless some local ordinance said you couldn't. around the beginning of the 20th century governments in the western world started realizing it was a cool and useful thing to have a formal process to determine who could build what, where. in the united states this was confirmed in the supreme court decision euclid vs. ambler realty co. which basically said that local governments had a legal right to establish land use zoning. i'm not familiar with the legal history in european nations but it's probably both older and similar. anyway the idea, which the germans came up with, is that you chop up all the land into zones and then you define what can happen in those zones.

zoning authority ultimately rests with the local jurisdiction, in the united states either the city or the county. in the united states, the states have the ability to incorporate cities (more or less, there are 50 different ways to do it) as well as the power to establish regional or metropolitan planning bodies. most states have weak or nonexistent regional planning bodies (special exception: oregon, because of a wave of environmentalism in the 1970's). because of the 10th amendment to the us constitution, basically the "keep your nose out of the state's business" clause, the federal government is actually pretty powerless to handle local land use policy, so they don't really matter. the basic chain of land use control in the united states is:

states, who can legally create cities and define what cities can do
regional/metro planning organizations, if they exist, which can override local control
counties, which take over in non-incorporated areas aka. places outside of any city
cities, which generally have the bulk of land use control in the usa

so one of the basic functions of american cities is to control land use zoning. problem is that it's often fairly easy to incorporate to become a city, and there's a couple good reasons to do so - namely, to gain local control of property tax collection/expenditure and land use zoning. it's a fairly common thing for american metropolitan areas to be split up among dozens if not hundreds of cities, each with its own little fiefdom of land use authority (in the absence of a larger planning organization). you don't see as much of this in european nations because the sensible thing to do is to establish regional planning bodies to coordinate all of these little decision makers. some european nations are so geographically small that it actually makes sense to nationalize planning - england for example has a single national planning authority, with the exception of the london region. but in the usa, you have a thousand thousand little jurisdictions - so we say the jurisdictions are fragmented, and uncoordinated, and largely up to the whims of what kinds of development the local government wants to have

this intersects with single-use zoning. a sort of natural, organic way to build cities is to have multiple uses. shops on the ground floor, housing above. housing and shops and businessess and offices all mixed together side by side. you see a lot of this in europe, this is also part of the urban morphology of a city oriented around the pedestrian mode. in america, for various reasons, you tend to see single use zoning - large areas which are just housing, or just offices, or just industry, etc. this is more automotive mode morphology. and one of the things you can do with single use zoning is establish more granular and draconian restrictions on the kinds of things which can be built in that zone. for example, we may define a whole zone as R-1 which means "only single story, single family freestanding structures on lots of no less than .5 acres which cover no more than half the lot" which produces large, relatively expensive, spread out neighborhoods - perfect for keeping out poors. so if you legally bar apartments from being built, you can create that sort of "missing middle" thing you describe. but this is absolutely a legal problem, not a practical or physical problem (to a certain extent - once you start greatly increasing the density of old single family neighborhoods you start running into nasty traffic problems requiring more transportation infrastructure, etc.)

i keep saying america but the same is kind of true in canada - canada has one foot on both sides, both there's a ton of land in canada and it's a young country which largely developed in an automotive mode context, but also canadian government has less of a hardon for local autonomy thus there's more weight in regional planning and control, which is an unequivocal good thing when it comes to sane metropolitan areas

There are a couple interesting counter-examples to this in the U.S. Portland has the Metro Council, which I believe has land use control, and also very strict urban growth boundaries. A big problem in Texas at least is that outside of city limits, developers can sprawl all over the place with the only limit being how much land they can buy. In Oregon (I believe) the areas that can be built up are dictated by the state, and only very very limited growth can happen outside those areas.

Twin Cities also has a Metro Council with land use control. I don't think Minnesota has urban growth boundaries, but this is another example of stronger regional planning that can lead to more sensible land use decisions.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 04:10

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

boner confessor posted:

kunstler is a crazy, crotchety rear end in a top hat but he's completely on point when it comes to the banal soullessness of suburban development

his main thesis is that it doesn't have to be this way! we can make suburban areas worth caring about! suburbs aren't inherently bad, they're specifically made that way through low effort laziness

This is important to note because there were some very well developed and pleasant suburbs from pre-WWII. Riverside, IL was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the guy who did Central Park, and is one that gets called out a lot as a good example but I'm having a hard time finding decent pictures. Others sprang up around street car lines and are therefore more walkable than you would expect. The lovely suburb we think about today is post-WWII, and is only the way it is because of deliberate decisions and laziness. Some parts of central cities that people love today began as suburbs!

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 04:18

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

This is a very fun blog if you want to get into suburban architecture: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/

Lots of informative posts in addition to the ones making fun of McMansions. Add to OP imo.

boner confessor posted:

prewar, early 20th century automotive suburbs - most of inner los angeles, the outer reaches of most american cities within the city limits - marked by smaller houses with driveways but no dedicated car storage. you'd drive from your house to the city a few miles away. these places are more notably suburban in character but still usually very expensive today, if they haven't been completely redeveloped, and if they're on the right side of town of course. can also be aggressively lower middle class. the very inner fringe of what are called "inner ring suburbs". from 1920sish and the first big suburban boom / white flight era in america until the late 1950's and the beginnings of the interstate highway system

This is interesting to me because most Texas cities are still annexing aggressively, so the city limits of Austin are probably 1960s or 1970s development at the absolute earliest. Our prewar suburbs are defined as central city now.

Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Dec 2, 2016

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 04:41

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

The Urban Land Institute came out with an interesting report about the state of the suburbs.

Commentary here: http://cityobservatory.org/are-the-burbs-really-back/

Original report here: http://uli.org/wp-content/uploads/ULI-Documents/Housing-in-the-Evolving-American-Suburb.pdf

The headline finding going around a lot of places is that Suburbs Are Back but if you read the commentary piece about it's a little different.

There's also a fun little map where you can see how ULI classified areas of your city - they don't follow the classic approach where everything in an MSA outside the central city is generic "suburb."

http://rclco.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=6e5e27a780ff4b9fb8a50f3561a1c213

e: also Trump is bringing back urban renewal y'all :sun:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/upshot/why-trumps-use-of-the-words-urban-renewal-is-scary-for-cities.html?_r=0

Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 9, 2016

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 01:48

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

ryonguy posted:

Want to laugh? Check out the East Valley in the same area where between '00 and '07 idiots built up massive shopping centers on the intersections of the 1-mile grids in anticipation of the residential neighborhoods that were about to be built. I worked for a butcher shop driving delivery to little independent restaurants and nothing was more hilarious/sad than delivering to a sports bar in the middle of four square miles of nothing. Let's just say not too many of them survived.

For my own zoning nightmare, I bought a plot of property I eventually want to build a house on. I wanted to go with a small house, as I enjoyed living in a Mother-in-law house that had to have been less than 700 sq ft, and I want to keep costs down. Guess whose town has 1300 sq ft minimum housing sizes? Well, it must be for "No houses too small to inhabit" or some other sensible reason right?

Guess whose town also has no building codes? Nope, the square footage requirement is literally the only housing restriction. The city engineer told me, verbatim, "You can build a mud hut as long as it's thirteen hundred square feet." Imagine an HOA run by Three Olives for the full effect of how housing works around here.

Also, that McMansionHell blog is loving hilarious and seriously pro-read.

Where the hell do you live? This sounds like a fair housing suit waiting to happen.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 03:27

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

ryonguy posted:

Oh, believe me, I am going to challenge it. It was pretty clear the city engineer didn't think to highly of it, and he said I could apply for a variance.

I could use any and all advice on that front though (think of me as the anti-Grover if you will).

I'm not a lawyer so I'd recommend contacting...your state ACLU maybe? This is pretty obviously a disparate impact situation but they can give you a better idea of whether a judge would agree. If you live in a blue state and have a Democrat state legislator you could maybe contact them as well.

This is the relevant Supreme Court case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Department_of_Housing_and_Community_Affairs_v._Inclusive_Communities_Project,_Inc.

e: the lawyers for the above case listed their att.net and swbell.net email addresses ( :eyepop:

) in their filings so I'm guessing they're not from a big firm.

Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Dec 9, 2016

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 03:44

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Neurolimal posted:

A lot of problems around suburbs could be solved if we dismantled the housing industry and froze property values

it's always going to be a problem providing for the disadvantaged and expanding cities when doing either raises the land value and incentivizes forcing poor people out of their homes

Things would be different if the system worked completely different to how it currently does, it's true

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 22:49

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

This is like anti-vax but for real estate. "Why do we use these dumb umbrellas?? I never get wet"

The Obama White House agrees with him: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 20:37

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

A guy who thinks "endless lovely tract housing in desert scrubland" is a model for how the real estate industry should work is not a supporter of higher density, mixed-use zoning, and "radically loosening the restrictions" would not get you higher density, mixed-use zoning, it would get you whatever developers see the biggest dollar signs in.

He didn't say it was a model. He said it's happens because that's what is easiest to build. If you made it easier to build other things (like mixed use, high density) then those things would happen more often.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 23:02

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

No, then they would just build the easy thing in more places.

There are ways to make it easier to build desired developments while keeping them from building suburban tract homes in the middle of downtown.

e: Here's an example: https://www.kcet.org/departures-columns/how-downtown-la-became-a-place-to-live-without-parking

LA's code required high parking minimums for downtown and so there were a bunch of vacant buildings that no one wanted to renovate because they didn't want to pay for the parking. The Adaptive Reuse Ordinance reduced the parking minimums and LA got a bunch of downtown housing units in renovated historic buildings.

Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Dec 11, 2016

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 23:40

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Zachack posted:

Automated pools that get you to bus/train hubs, then go back for more people. Small buses that go to big buses. IMO the larger benefit is reduction in parking needs. Vehicle count on the road may not change much but being able to dismiss my car into a garage should reduce parking needs and behavior (it helps that all the smart car designs are small). In fantasy autopia the garage would be solely for self-driving cars and they could self-valet into a much more dense arrangement. Eventually a hivemind will form but I should be old and gone by then.

In this scenario does everyone still have their own car that sits around doing nothing when they're not using it? That need to park the car somewhere close by causes a lot of land use problems.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2016 18:43

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

falcon2424 posted:

Automated carpooling will make a huge difference even in cities.

City bus routes seem to have a stop every couple blocks. That lets people take the bus between any two points in the city. But it also means that busses are painfully slow.

Busses are also bad at responding to a surge in demand between two points. If the SF Zoo had a big event one day, you could see a huge block of people wanting to go from the Caltrain station to the Zoo. But the bus line will still stop every block, and still take the standard detours.

Carpooling apps could do great things for public transportation systems. Cities could keep scheduled busses or light rail along a few main routes. And everywhere else, they could schedule rides on-demand and group passengers who share similar destinations.

Buses can respond to these things though. Stops can be removed or changed and frequency can be increased for special events. In fact that's one of the virtues of buses over trains in some cases! You can change them around and move them and add more without having to build a bunch of infrastructure.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2016 05:03

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

on the left posted:

Bussing is kind of like giving up on the problem. It means acknowledging that there's just a lot of lovely students, and the hope is that if you spread them out enough, you can greatly limit the impact they have on education.

People in good neighborhoods are right to viciously oppose bussing.

Bussing does not mean moving "lovely" students unless you think all minority students are lovely.

Although I don't like to make this argument since it focuses on benefits to white people, it's the only one SCOTUS allows: white students also benefit from having classmates from a range of racial/ethnic backgrounds.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2016 22:00

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

on the left posted:

Law of averages says the average minority student from a bad neighborhood will be behind the rest of the class and bring a number of social issues into the wealthier school.

If their parents can't afford a good school I suppose those dumb nonwhite kids just have to suffer. Oh well!

quote:

If bussing revolved around taking the top 10% of students out of poorly performing schools and busing them to better schools, I think a lot of people would be behind that, except for leftists who would scream about "Concentrating poverty and making bad schools worse REEEEEE!" like they bitterly complain about charter schools doing.

If you did that you would literally be concentrating poverty and making bad schools worse though????

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 05:44

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

I've never seen some describe the zip code lottery as a good thing before, really.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 05:45

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

on the left posted:

If the real goal of the program is to foster school diversity, what's wrong with just grabbing the talented tenth out of underperforming schools and busing them to the suburbs?

As I mentioned earlier, the real goal is to spread out poverty thinly enough that nobody notices with a bonus of using minorities as a political statement and show of force for progressive causes.

That's not the only goal.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 07:18

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

boner confessor posted:

it's amazing how hosed DC is with its not-state weird limbo status and the fact that two states and loving congress have a say in WMATA funding. god drat

like as bad as atlanta is (two now three counties and scattered cities providing most of the funding, a hostile state government that refuses meaningful funding and allows non-paying counties to have voting reps on the MARTA board for some idiot reason) at least nothing goes above the state level

????????

Can they vote to give themselves service that they don't pay for?

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 19:59

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Polycentrism doesn't preclude housing next to jobs, though. You just have to get enough jobs next to enough housing instead of still having the vast majority of jobs in one place.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 20:27

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Isn't Houston polycentric? I guess you could define within the Loop as the center but that's a pretty big area.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 22:19

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

This article is driving me insane: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/12/using-preservation-to-stop-gentrification-before-it-starts/510653/

The author and many people quoted in it say over and over that historic designation will prevent gentrification, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work. This seems to be their argument:

quote:

Each situation is different and in Golden Belt�s case, its history might be its salvation. �There�s only so much you can do with some houses,� says Mallach, looking at Golden Belt�s homes on Google Maps� street view during a phone interview. �They�re very small.�

Indeed, most of the neighborhood�s houses are around 1,000 square feet�petite by modern standards. Even an addition that meets the historic specifications probably wouldn't add all that much space. That puts a ceiling on how expensive the homes can get�which will be a good thing for Golden Belt over the next few decades.

It seems like they're assuming that because the ability to build more stuff on each lot is limited, prices will not rise. But a neighborhood with single family houses close to downtown in a growing city seems like a perfect recipe for rising land/home values regardless of what you can build there because more people are going to want to live in those houses.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2016 06:12

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

That article seems to say that the problem is they don't have enough drivers, rather than that the ones they do have are a huge drain on their budget.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2016 17:04

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

ryonguy posted:

No it's surely those lazy slobs who want a living wage. If only we could purge ourselves of these untermensch who demand to eat and live on the real earner's dime, then we could have a technological utopia.

New post on McMansionHell:

http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/154653904191/a-pictorial-history-of-suburbia

What say the thread, good or bad?

This image is crazy to me because it looks so much like the brand new suburbs I know from growing up in Texas.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2016 04:37

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Here's an interesting DC area story about land use discrimination from an angle I hadn't heard of before: islamophobia!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...f2fd_story.html

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 22:39

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 10:05

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Reviving this since I don't know where else to put it - Republicans in Congress have filed a bill to nullify the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (text of the bill here). I doubt Carson's HUD would have enforced it anyway but it would have been nice to have. RIP in advance.

Also this from the bill:

quote:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.

As we all know, John Roberts wisely and correctly decided in Shelby County that Racism Is Over, so I'm not sure why you need to spend money on something like this anyway tbqh.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2017 07:35

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