Who’s Got the Clue?
Atrios? Nope: Kevin Drum.
There are people that like mixed-use communities and will, in fact, pay a premium to live in them. Kentlands in Gaithersburg is the closest example to my house. I’ve driven through Kentlands and visited some of its shopping streets: it’s quite nice.
Here’s the thing, though, and the point is not original to me, but I can’t remember who made it: sorry. Kentlands and developments like it “free-ride” on Suburbia Classic. Surrounding Kentlands is the rest of Gaithersburg, which follows much more typical outer-suburb development patterns – garden apartments around something that used to be a town core, housing association tracts around that and shopping strips of big-box stores between. If you live in Kentlands, you do some of your shopping there, but you do quite a bit of it at Best Buy and Target and Barnes and Noble outside Kentlands. Note that they do not walk to those places either. If Suburbia Classic were not just outside the borders, Kentlands would be that much less attractive place to live, and housing prices would drop accordingly.
Within biking distance of my house is the determinedly quaint Garrett Park, which, in addition to being nuclear-free by ordinanace, restricts commercial development to a half block of Mayberry-cum-Napa next to the MARC Rail station. It’s all very lovely, and it all depends on the fact that Garrett Park is just around the corner from Montgomery County’s premiere shopping strip, the stretch of Rockville Pike running from White Flint Mall to to Rockville Town Centre. Nor does Garrett Park’s quaintness come cheap. Its median household income in 2000 was $107K.
I’m not here to say Exurbia Uber Alles. I live in inner-suburbia rather than outer-suburbia myself and like it that way. And I grew up in an honest-to-goodness small town. But I certainly do my share of shopping along Rockville Pike, and in the massive suburban grocery stores that dedicated Brooklynites Mr. and Mrs. Talking Dog allowed to me, in conversation, are the glory of suburbia. And I think that for some people some of the time, exurban development amounts to killing the thing you love: people move “away from the rat race” but since everybody else has the same idea, the rat race comes to them. Still, my cynical definition of “sprawl” is “where other people live.” I’m in favor of ending certain zoning restrictions that prohibit dense development in places like Eastern Montgomery County, Maryland, but not in mandating dense development.
Comment by Atrios —
June 4, 2005 @ 10:53 pm
Well, I certainly didn’t say anything about mandating dense development. I think it’s wrong to perceive anything about development in general as being a pure market outcome meeting consumer demands, though nor do I disagree with the basic assertion that suburban development is, roughly, meeting consumer demand. It’s the nontrivial details which I think are perhaps a bit screwy.
As for exurbia, I don’t really put it in the category of things I was thinking about. It’s something people who think developing open space is an intrinsic bad, which I don’t, worry about. “Sprawl” to me isn’t bad because it’s eating up farmland, or whatever, it’s potentially bad because it’s for a variety of reasons economically inefficient.
And, to reiterate, while I said nothing about mandating dense development, we have to remember that even in the most purely private development sans zoning laws, a big chunk of public infrastructure is still… public, and therefore the decisions about its form and placement have a big impact on the final patterns of development.
Comment by Tyrone Slothrop —
June 5, 2005 @ 12:28 am
I’ll differ. The kind of mixed-use suburb that Kevin was talking about — that I thought Kevin was talking about — doesn’t exclude the sort of businesses that you’re talking about, necessarily. You can have your small shopping districts within walking distance, and you can have your big-box stores, too. Take Berkeley, California, for example, which is (I think) the sort of older close suburb that I thought Kevin had in mind. Plenty of shopping districts around town, and there’s a new Target down by the Interstate.
I don’t know Kentlands and Garrett Park at all, but I would wager that if they’re not building Targets in Kentlands, it has more to do with the lack of appropriate sites, and that if housing prices in Garrett Park are high, it’s the cause, not the effect, of the restrictions on retail use.
Comment by none —
June 5, 2005 @ 1:38 am
To respond to Atrios’ comment above, he’s wrong, or at least overstates the impact of public expenditures on development. Take Phoenix, a classic sprawl city. Virtually all new construction has happened outside of the urban core, despite the City and state spending some 2.5 billion since the mid 80s on downtown construction. Sure government can spend all it wants, and of course at some point, some people will return to urban centers, but for the most part, people build, sans zoning laws, sprawling suburbs because that’s what most people, though not Atrios, want. Europe’s populations are more densely packed because 1. of space constraints 2. lack of available private land 3. more fully-formed cities before the advent of the automobile.
Trackback by Perverse Access Memory —
June 5, 2005 @ 9:00 am
B.F.E.
Here’s a report on how far out Houstonians are thinking about moving to get that country feel. Apparently Highway 6…
Trackback by Off the Kuff —
June 5, 2005 @ 3:06 pm
Far out!
There’s some good conversation going on around suburbia versus inner-urbia and the nature of mixed-use development – see Atrios, Kevin…
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 5, 2005 @ 9:44 pm
I guess this is a good time to cite Edward Glaeser and co.’s paper “Why is Manhattan So Expensive? Regulation and the Rise of House Prices“. The upshot is that the sort of zoning restrictions Jim alludes to in his last sentence roughly double the price of housing in most urban markets.