Does Sprawl Make Housing Affordable?

When a Berkeley economist with a PhD  asserts in a new paper that sprawl is the best way of generating affordable housing and uses a litany of graphs to prove that single family development is not only the domain of suburbia but also of all American cities and Columbia PhD urban planner Richard Florida writes a rebuttal in CityLab, the sparring should be quite interesting, especially since Florida, the 2004 inventor of the term creative class a theory that predicted the current  migration of millennials to cities, used CityLab for years to tell us how suburbs are out and cities are where innovation and everthing else happens. Issi Romem, the economist, is the less well known, but just like Florida, he presides over his own research outlet called BuildZoom.

Sprawl

Alas, in spite of Issi Romem's contention that cities have to choose between expansive or expensive, Florida has little to offer in the way of a rebuttal.

Romem published his paper Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal picked it up and Florida managed to comment on it the same day in CityLab. Since then the Washington Post and Bloomberg News have weighed in as well.

Here are Romems main take-aways lifted from his own summary:

• The link between housing production and outward expansion is unmistakable: cities that expand more produce proportionally more new housing.
• Throughout the country, housing production is skewed towards low density areas.
• Densification has slowed down across the board, and especially in expensive cities, undermining their ability to compensate for less outward expansion.
• Unless they enact fundamental changes that allow for substantially more densification, cities confronting growth pressure face a tradeoff between accommodating growth through outward expansion, or accepting the social implications of failing to build enough new housing.

The matter isn't  about these two  guys, really, interesting as they may be, but about whether sprawl is really unavoidable or even desirable. Florida should be appalled by the notion but instead appears to be just floored by the onslought of Romem's sprawl numbers. Indeed, the figures are overwhelmingly clear and on first glance convincing.

Urbanists like to think that the back-to-the-city movement has increased density and mitigated sprawl, but Romem shows that America has seen a long-run decline in density. (Florida in CityLab)

Developed land areas and low density uses (BuildZoom)

With that statement Florida folds his tent and seems to abandon in one sentence all he has propagated in the last 10 years or so. His objections are meek at best:

This long era of cheap, suburban growth has its limits. Many of our most expensive metros have reached the limits of outward expansion, and many others are headed toward it. Not to mention, reurbanization and densification are required both for future innovation and growth, and to address the mounting inequality and spatial segregation of America’s expensive cities. Our cities and the nation as a whole face some very tough choices ahead. (Florida in CityLab)

But on second thought the figures and the ensuing discussion about the dominance of single family homes in the US are surprisingly shallow, provide no new insights and are really not so newsworthy. In fact, there are many possible objections:

• Romem looks at periods from either 1940 to 2000 or from 1980 to now, exactly the periods known to have been the height of sprawl and urban flight. This isn't really anything new. Whatver went differently in the last few years is not visible when looking at several decades at once.
• Romem gets his results not by comparing incorporated core cities but entire metro areas. Metro area is an often shaky definition which most of the time includes one core city and many surrounding jurisdictions. Clearly that geographic definition skews the data of home cosntruction towards large lot sprawl development. Again nothing new.
• Cost of housing is seen in simplistic terms ("building on green fields is cheaper") without distinguishing between land-cost and cost of structures and without mentioning "external costs" such as the environment and infrastructure usually not carried by the developers or home-buyers. 
• Affordability is simply seen as a function of housing cost without factoring in the transportation cost that cheap but far away housing necessarily produces
• Especially Romem fails to mention that sprawl is hardly a function of the attempt to deliver affordable products and much rather the result of systemic discrimination and racism. Sprawl in postwar America is largely a segregation machine which systematically sorts out the poor and minorities which are warehoused in the core cities through large lot zoning etc., restrictive covenants, redlining, block busting and other onerous real estate practices.
• There is no mention of the lopsided way in which housing is delivered in the US through a template of speculative single family home production catering to a narrow price point in any given suburban development. 
• The study isn't fine-grained enough to detect recent demographic shifts that have brought about the first change to the prevailing housing production model in 60 years because the prevailing model simply doesn't meet the needs of the two largest population cohorts, the boomers and the millenials.
• More and more home-builders are now experimenting with urban infill mixed use models, usually of the "one plus five" variety of 3-5 wood framed stick-built apartment levels stacked on top of a concrete podium. That building type can now be found in cities and even some suburban centers all across the United States delivering tens of thousands of density dwelling units. 

Balto Wash area as a dynamic illustration from 1940-2010

Those omissions are especially confounding because both scholars are confessed friends of cities.

Of course cities should favor densification over the ills of sprawl. But if the past is any guide to the future, failing to expand cities will come at a cost. Cities that have curbed their expansion have -- with limited exception -- failed to compensate with densification. (Romem)

The Washington Post summarizes the findings this way:

Romem’s data show that cities produce new housing in proportion to their rate of outward expansion. Metros that spread out the most add the most housing, and have kept their housing costs in check as a result. Metros that have resisted sprawl (like Portland, which has an urban growth boundary, or San Francisco, which is hemmed in by mountains and water) haven’t built much.

Even Romems lament that cities would hardly have the will to accommodate large scale density is not necessarily correct: Vancouver is a city that planned very deliberately for densification and accommodation of the expected growth inside defined boundaries. Vancouver have been hugely successful with that to a point that the city is routinely included in lists of the top ten most livable cities in the world.

Additional comments  by Romem sent to Bloomberg's Justin Fox via e-mail are even more discouraging:

"Is sprawl so bad? Many of the arguments against sprawl boil down to taste, e.g. sprawl lacks character. A key set of arguments that aren’t a matter of taste involve the environment, but…
Greater carbon footprint? Will the carbon footprint still be such a concern if cars are electric, and more and more electricity comes from renewable sources like solar power?
Rural land lost to sprawl? The US is still a mostly empty country, even today.
More obesity when people walk less? Yep, this is true". (Romem)

Come one, the man must have been really tired when he wrote those notes!

• The cost of sprawl isn't an issue of taste and character even if Howard Kunstler's book "The Geography of Nowhere" emphasized that aspect. Sprawl has a huge economic cost. Over the long haul the dispersal pattern is not sustainable for the services needed , whether it is schools, libraries, fire houses, roads, water, sewer, cable, electricity or the cost of pollution from well and septic. Sprawl bankrupts communities when infrastructure starts to crumble  after the initial bonfire of revenues from development fees.
• The carbon footprint of the US is in large part so big because of sprawl. Electric cars and more solar power cannot eliminate the inherent inefficiencies of sprawl.
• The typical frequent flyer observation that the "US is still mostly empty" is the most ludicrous assertion of all. Yes, it is true, but what spaces are empty? What use are they to the people in dense metro areas like Baltimore-Washington or San Diego-LA? Many US metro areas areas approach European density levels, but thanks to unmitigated sprawl, they do not have the typical European benefit of protected green spaces surrounding clearly defined communities. 

  

  Low density housing shares in
  major cities (BuildZoom)

Neither author makes the obvious reference to urban researcher David Rusk who made the exact same point 25 years ago when he proffered his theory of inelastic and elastic cities with pretty much the same data and arguments. Just like Romem Rusk said that cities either grow outward or not at all (because residents wouldn't accept density) and that those inelastic cities who can't grow are doomed.

I commented on Rusk in a recent blog arguing that especially legacy cities with their vast industrial sites have ample opportunity to expand inside their boundaries.
We have seen an astounding turnaround of cities since then, including some of the presumably doomed cities flourished.

Under the heading What is the path forward Romem offers three options:

The projected growth of the U.S. population will exert growth pressure on expensive and expansive cities alike. There is infinite nuance in how cities can respond to the challenge, but essentially they must situate themselves in the space defined by three alternatives. 

• The first alternative is to expand with gusto. Cities that follow this path will maintain housing at more affordable levels, thereby retaining their current social character. However, going down this path will further entrench the ills associated with sprawl.  [..]

• The second alternative is to avoid expansion, and maintain the status quo with respect to densification. Going down this path will divert population growth towards more accommodating U.S. cities (the expansive ones), [..] it will render housing increasingly unaffordable for a growing share of the population, and has already set in motion a sorting process whereby, on net, the affluent migrate into such cities while the less affluent are crowded out. [..]

• The third alternative is to enact fundamental changes to land use policy that prompt far more substantial densification than any U.S. city has undergone to date. [..] It would require cities to stop relying on vacant lots as the primary means of densification, and embrace redevelopment instead. [..]

Neither the first nor the second are acceptable futures and Romem says so himself in so many words if one reads his full text. However, he makes the third option sound so impossible. He ignores major potential areas for easy dense redevelopment:

• America is over-retailed. Every city has large commercial areas along its peripheral arterials that are underutilized or fallow. Those sites can easily be redeveloped without changing the character of residential communities. Each failing mall can become a dense mixed use neighborhood with lots of new housing. 
• Legacy cities are rife with abandoned industrial sites and brownfields. Those, too, can often be developed for mixed dense use. Baltimore is in the process of sticking three million square feet of new development on a 26 acre capped brownfield including residences  (not affordable one, though)
•  A change away from car orientation towards transit and autonomous vehicle fleet mobility will free additional vast amounts of space currently used for surface parking or parking garages or excessively wide streets. Again plenty of opportunities for density and growth without expansion.

Vienna (Austria) offers a model for density and affordability combined  where the right regulatory framework and the political will are in place.  With Aspern  Vienna shows that even a old historic city can still grow responsibly. Baltimore is just drying the ink on a deal in which it may demonstrate how to build a whole small town on the 240 acre brownfield of Port Covington with 14,000 new housing units, 20% of them set aside as affordable.

Issi Romem sounds a lot like Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 when he proclaimed in his book Essay on the Principle of Population that the world wouln't be able to feed the ever growing population and projected mass starvation. We know how accurate that prediction was.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA