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Green Cities, Brown Suburbs by Edward L. Glaeser, City Journal Winter 2009

Ed Glaeser makes the point that cities are much greener than non-urban areas, all things considered. Your country or suburb carbon footprint is huge compared to your urban carbon footprint.

Tags: edward_glaeser, city_journal, urbanism, green_strategies, suburbs, cities on 2009-03-10 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (18) -About

more fromwww.city-journal.org

if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers.
second paradox follows from the first. When environmentalists resist new construction in their dense but environmentally friendly cities, they inadvertently ensure that it will take place somewhere else—somewhere with higher carbon emissions. Much local environmentalism, in short, is bad for the environment.
Matthew Kahn, a professor of economics at UCLA, and I have quantified the first paradox.
we’re trying to determine where future home construction would do the least environmental damage.
Add Sticky Note
- - that's key.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-10
In almost every metropolitan area, carbon emissions are significantly lower for people who live in central cities than for people who live in suburbs.
New York City has the largest gap in emissions between central city and suburbs of any metropolitan area in the country—unsurprisingly, since New York’s central city is the epitome of dense urban living. Our estimate is that an average New York City resident emits 4,462 pounds less of transportation-related carbon dioxide than an average New York suburbanite. The reductions in carbon emissions from home heating and electricity are comparably large, thanks to New York’s famously tiny apartments. Manhattan is one of the greenest places in America.
These four cities notwithstanding, the data suggest a strong general pattern: households in dense urban areas have significantly lower carbon emissions than households in the suburbs. The lifestyle that Thoreau preferred, living surrounded by green space, tends to be far less kind to the planet and far likelier to raise global temperatures, just as Thoreau himself did that afternoon in 1844.
There is a large and growing literature, ranging from complete skepticism to ultra-alarmism, devoted to the question of just how much environmental damage is associated with carbon emissions. The widely cited Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change claims that each ton of carbon dioxide emissions causes $85 worth of damage to the planet. More commonly accepted estimates are considerably lower; one meta-study suggests an average cost of about $15 per ton of carbon dioxide. The right number probably lies somewhere between $15 and $85.
Even if, like many economists, you think that the Stern Review overstates the true damage per ton and you chop its proposed cost in half, then the average new home in Memphis still does about $620 worth of environmental harm per year more than an average new home in San Francisco, since San Francisco homes are associated with 14.65 fewer tons of carbon dioxide each year. Once you crunch the numbers, that makes the lifetime environmental cost of building in Memphis, rather than San Francisco, $12,400 per home—a big number relative to Memphis’s average housing price of $90,000.
Before even considering carbon taxes, the country should rethink its land-use policies, which currently push people toward high-emissions areas and away from green ones.
The chart shows a strong negative correlation between restrictiveness and carbon dioxide emissions.
But California’s abundant restrictions on new construction don’t do much to deter building across America as a whole. No matter what the Bay Area does, plenty of new households will come into being, and they will need new homes. By restricting local development, California regulators just make sure that construction occurs someplace else. That someplace else tends to be a lot less environmentally friendly than the California coast, blessed as it is with a superbly temperate climate. The net result of this process: land-use restrictions in California increase carbon emissions and raise the risks of global warming.
The great irony, of course, is that land-use regulations are so often justified by environmental arguments.
So California environmentalists have things exactly backward. If climate change is the major environmental challenge that we face, the state should actively encourage new construction, rather than push it toward other areas. True, increasing development in California might increase per-household carbon emissions within the state if the new development, following the current model, took place on the extreme edges of urban areas. A better path would be to ease restrictions in the urban cores of San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. More building there would reduce average commute lengths and improve per-capita emissions. Higher densities could also justify more investment in new, low-emissions energy plants.
Similarly, limiting the height or growth of New York City skyscrapers incurs environmental costs. Building more apartments in Gotham will not only make the city more affordable; it will also reduce global warming.
Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
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- Best ending sentence, ever.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-03-10

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Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? - WSJ.com

Interesting article by Lee Siegel on the history of hating the suburbs.

His point about cities having become more uniform/ conformist (i.e., like suburbs) is interesting. Not sure how well this all holds up, though...
QUOTE
One of the most glaring ironies of American life is that, a quarter-century later, the cities have metamorphosed into the suburbs -- sans trees and grass. The cities' fabled diversity has devolved into global chain stores and the electrolyte-enhanced water bottle and the branded baseball cap have become the accessories of a universal comfort and conformity. In a social and cultural sea change, the cities' rented apartments, once the guarantor of diversity and fluid, exciting movement, have been converted into exclusive co-ops and condominiums.
UNQUOTE

Tags: wsj.com, suburbs, hollywood, lee_siegel, lifestyle on 2008-12-29 -All Annotations (3) -About

more fromonline.wsj.com

The cultural chasm between liberals and conservatives that first appeared in the '60s was largely one between the city and the suburbs. The liberal "idealism" that had created the catastrophe in Vietnam now got blamed, unfairly or not, for failing economic and social policies. For marginalized conservatives, the suburbs were living refutation of the crumbling ethos that had guided the crime-ridden, decaying urban centers. For embattled liberals, people leaving the cities for safer and cleaner outlying towns were racists and cowards who had no respect for shared public space.
One of the most glaring ironies of American life is that, a quarter-century later, the cities have metamorphosed into the suburbs -- sans trees and grass. The cities' fabled diversity has devolved into global chain stores and the electrolyte-enhanced water bottle and the branded baseball cap have become the accessories of a universal comfort and conformity. In a social and cultural sea change, the cities' rented apartments, once the guarantor of diversity and fluid, exciting movement, have been converted into exclusive co-ops and condominiums. Yet as the cities have become a new type of suburb, suburb-phobia has become an ever more acceptable cultural attitude. The suburban person is considered too meek, too asphalt-challenged to inherit the earth. In the urban centers, on the other hand, desperate ambition makes bad manners respectable, and the chic of perverse taste covers up Philistine cluelessness. The decent, suburban person is regarded as contemptible because he has not learned to reach beyond his talents and pick life's pockets.
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- ...well, there's some clever hyperbole here, but come now: "decent, suburban person"? All of them?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-12-29

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"I Purchase, Therefore I Am," by Richard Florida - Creative Class blog

Great entry by Richard Florida, which underscores the connection between suburbanization, reliance on cheap gasoline, consumption, and using housing/ real estate as a "piggy bank" that one could always raid to get money to buy more stuff. See entry, and annotations/ highlights.

I added a comment, in response to an existing comment by Wendy Waters, and then a second one in response to Kwende Kefentse.

Tags: creative_class, economy, financial_crisis, mortgage_crisis, richard_florida, suburbs on 2008-10-06 -All Annotations (13) -About

more fromwww.creativeclass.com

Most experts agree this is the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The stock market is down almost 25 percent so far this year. Housing prices in the United States are off more than 20 per cent since their peak in 2006. Manufacturing output is falling and consumer confidence has slipped.
Martin Feldstein, former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, past chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard economics professor - usually a voice of calming reassurance - wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Sliding into recession, monetary policy already at maximum easing, and fiscal transfers impotent … an unenviable situation, to say the least, for any incoming president.”
Where did this financial mess come from? And what does it mean?
The easy answer is to blame the housing market.
Banks and financial institutions, so the story goes, are clogged with this bad debt, now dubbed toxic waste. This is the kind of thinking behind the U.S. financial bailout: Remove the toxicity and all will magically be well again.
The real reason is that the roots of the current crisis are tied to the fundamental nature of the postwar model of economic development called “Fordism.” That model drew a tight connection between assembly-line mass production and mass consumption - ultimately fueled by massive suburbanization.
Fordism emerged as a full-blown economic and social model during the 1930s, marked by president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and flourished after the Second World War, when government policies brought about the rise of longer-term mortgages and a new system organized under the now infamous Fannie Mae to purchase those mortgages and thus lubricate the system.
Add to that massive tax breaks for homeownership and gargantuan subsidies for highway construction and infrastructure, and a whole new model of suburban-fueled mass consumption was born - family after family purchased new homes, filling them with TVs, appliances and all manner of furnishings, while also purchasing record numbers of cars to get to and from work.
Add Sticky Note
- I also blogged this, here: http://tinyurl.com/52hr33
  posted by lampertina on 2008-10-06
- To underscore the validity of what Florida is saying here, watch the video of SoCal news, "What the meltdown looks like" (on trash-outs): http://tinyurl.com/3jryu9
  posted by lampertina on 2008-10-06
While Fordism looks stable on the surface, it suffers from a fatal flaw: It’s impossible for consumption to keep up with the ever-growing pace and efficiency of production. This is particularly true of recent times, when a great deal of production has been sent to China, India and other places where labour is cheaper. It’s hard for the working and middle classes to consume more when their wages are essentially stagnant. Low-wage workers in emerging economies do not have the income to fill the gap. And while the ranks of the rich have grown, the wealthy are a relatively small group that can buy only so many luxury cars, designer products, homes and yachts.
That’s where credit comes in. Those new fancy mortgage instruments were meant to turn homes into veritable “piggy banks” that could be used to finance bigger and better cars and homes and toys.
Almost a century ago, Austrian economist Rudolf Hilferding identified this basic contradiction of modern capitalism in his monumental work Finance Capital. Capitalist economic development stands on a shaky foundation, he argued - workers always produce more than they can consume, more even than society as a whole can consume.
Add Sticky Note
- - we always produce more than we can consume: so, can we get around to producing the "right" things, or is that impossible?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-10-06
As one leading blogger, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, recently put it: “Since consumption has come to depend on growth in indebtedness, a reversal, however painful, is necessary. Our excesses have been so great that there is no way out of this that does not lead to a general fall in living standards.”
There you have it. The financial crisis is in reality a much deeper crisis of our underlying economic model and our way of life. It’s a crisis of the way we have come to define ourselves.
Regardless of how or when the financial markets are restored, credit will be much harder to get - the age of the house as piggy bank is long gone.

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"Trading Places" by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

Tags: cities, downtown, creative_cities, suburbs, gentrification, trends, urbanization, urban_renewal, demographics on 2008-08-04 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromwww.tnr.com

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

The Next Slum? by Christopher B. Leinberger - The Atlantic, March 2008 |

Found via Richard Florida's "Creative Class" blog, Leinberger's article builds in part on a story that was reported in The Charlotte Observer a while back. With foreclosures on the rise and houses being abandoned, the absence of any sort of on-site amenities acts like an accelerant toward slum-hood.

Tags: atlantic_monthly, chris_leinberger, planning, redevelopment, slums, sprawl, suburbs on 2008-02-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.theatlantic.com

Radiant City :: A Documentary About Urban Sprawl

This seems kind of apropos in view of Victoria's development in the so-called Western Communities, called "Bear Mountain" (perhaps more appropriately, "bare mountain").

Tags: angst, anomie, sprawl, suburban_style, suburbs on 2008-01-23 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.radiantcitymovie.com

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