As a passionate enemy of suburban sprawl, I listened intently to an interview this morning on NPR with Brookings Institution demographer William Frey in which he notes that housing prices are falling faster in the areas outside cities. Is this a permanent correction that is making “exurbs” less desirable overall? And how are gas prices influencing this loss of home value? Mr. Frey was cautious in his answer, saying “the jury is still out” and that Americans have a history of moving outward from cities in order to buy more housing for less, seeing long commutes as an acceptable trade off.

However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that, when a commute costs more than one is saving on housing, while sucking up hours of one’s valuable time, (and as the saying goes, “They aren’t making more of that”) why would one buy a home in the far suburbs? Why, indeed?

Sperling’s Best Places did a survey two years ago when gas prices were at $2.90 a gallon. The following were the most expensive cities in which to commute and listed the average annual commuting cost:

City Annual Commuting Cost (2006)

1. Atlanta $5,772
2. Birmingham, Ala. $5,464
3. Orlando, Fla. $5,404
4. Jacksonville, Fla. $5,360
5. Pensacola, Fla. $5,173

So, if gas prices reach $6.00, Atlanta’s commuting cost would be over $10,000 per year. Yikes.

A posting on Wall Street Journal’s online edition reports that even the conservative International Energy Agency is moving toward the Peak Oil Pessimists’ camp. The conclusion is that it’s not speculators making oil go higher but simple capitalist principles like the law of supply and demand – developing countries are going to be driving up demand for many years to come.

So will this result in an end to sprawl? Will avoidance of driving cause the demise of the ugly, cookie-cutter mini-mall blight that has mushroomed around our cities like an invasive species? Let’s hope so.

Sprawl Kills

Addressing Peak Oil at the Local Level

It seems evident that small houses, situated in walkable neighborhoods, are greener than large homes occupying automobile-dependent sites. The new LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) rating system draws heavily from principles of new urbanism and smart growth. New urbanism includes sustainability as one of its tenets (see Green Communities, Part 1: New Urbanism), and many of the primary elements of smart growth (as listed on their website) have become synonymous with green:

• Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty and Critical Environmental Areas
• Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices
• Strengthen and Direct Development Towards Existing Communities
• Take Advantage of Compact Building Design

But is density, in fact, a prerequisite for green development?

Wayne A. Lemmon, a planner and real estate economist, argued in his article, “Can Sprawl be Good,” that (among other things), “Concentrating development in areas already served by public facilities makes good sense, but only up to the point where available capacity is fully utilized.”  

The National Association of Home Builders takes particular exception to the assumptions that underpin LEED. Their online article, “New LEED Certification for Development Found Wanting,” examines LEED-ND, and proposes that it may actually be inhibiting the progress of green development.  

NAHB land use planner Edward Tombari explains:

Based on NAHB’s experience with smart growth and new urbanism design principles, a majority of the projects being built by developers today that incorporate Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) principles might be able to achieve some lower-level LEED recognition. However, while the number of communities using TND principles is rising, the vast majority do not because TND favors higher density and most new development occurs in suburban and exurban greenfield locations. While this excludes much new development from being eligible to meet the criteria being established by LEED-ND, NAHB believes new development affords many opportunities for implementing green development principles.

Even though the notion of returning to ‘Main Street America’ seems to have captured the popular imagination, there is no sign that the production of large, detached, single-family homes will actually be coming to a halt anytime soon. (Barbara Faga’s article  on Planetizen, “Two Things People Hate: Density and Sprawl,” spurred a lively debate on this topic a few weeks ago.)

So, if urban sprawl is on a roll that cannot yet be stopped, can a neighborhood rating system that prioritizes density accomplish significant change? Many industry professionals believe that the LEED programs in place so far have managed to make a broad impact upon construction practices precisely because they have not set the bar impossibly high. Now the NAHB and the International Code Council are working on their own consensus-based National Green Building Standard, and this standard will be applicable to a wide range of developments, including conventional, suburban ones. (To view progress on the draft Standard, visit the NAHB Research Center site.) If consumers find the National Green Building Standard to be more adaptable than LEED, then perhaps LEED will have met its match in the American marketplace.

Photo Credit: NAHB
 

Speakers at a water conference in San Francisco today discussed the relationship between development and water supplies. Or, more to the point, the lack of water and continued urban sprawl in much of California and other western states.

The talk given by Roger Moore and David Boyer entitled, “The Water Supply and Land Use Interface: Lessons from a Decade of Litigation under the UWMPA, CEQA, and SB 610/221″ was part of the 2008 California Water Law & Policy Conference organized by Argent Communications Group.

Moore and Boyer, both environmental lawyers, shared their perspectives on California’s Urban Water Management Planning Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, and Senate Bills 610 and 221–often called the “show me the water” laws.

Those two bills are referred to by that phrase because they require builders to prove to city and county decision-makers that there is indeed enough water available to sustain human, animal, and plant life within a proposed area before the approval of any large-scale development project.

In the past, Moore explained, development projects have been approved based on “paper water”–or, water availability proved in reports–and not on actual water availability.

In a handout given at the conference, Moore writes, “The problem of paper water–in its simplest terms, of development decisions grounded in expectations of water exceeding what can actually be delivered–predictably arose from a long disconnect between water planning and land use decision-making. The relationship between water and land development is such an indelible theme in California that one of its leading water historians, William Kahrl, described “the history of California in the twentieth century” as “the story of a state inventing itself with water.”

As an opinion piece printed in the Los Angeles Times earlier this month put it: No water, no development.

Photo: FreePhotosBank.com