Many environmentalists believe that denser cities are better for the environment, as they use up less land and also require less energy for activities such as commuting. There’s also a perception that sprawl results from a lack of “planning”. But is this necessarily the case?
Wendell Cox has some surprising data on this topic:
The smallest lot sizes are one-half smaller than the national median of 0.26 acres. The major California metropolitan areas have among the smallest median lot sizes for existing 1-unit houses. This is not surprising, since California has the densest urbanization in the nation, as well as the first, second and third most densely populated major urban areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose, in that order and ahead of fourth place New York). . . .
Houston’s small lot size (0.18 acres) is particularly surprising, given the general contempt of many planners who characterize it as excessively sprawling (Figure 2). In fact, Houston has smaller lot sizes than urban planning favorite Portland and has an urban density only a little less dense (Note 2). . . .
In fact, the four largest Texas metropolitan areas, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin each have median lot sizes of from 0.18 acres to 0.25 acres, small or smaller than Philadelphia, Boston or Washington. The market orientation of Texas land and residential development have not resulted in less efficient use of land.
All of this is a yet another reminder that the data does not always support pre-conceived perceptions.
This is not to say there aren’t cases where cities are both denser than Houston and more highly regulated. But keep in mind that the density you see in places like Manhattan was created during a period where land use was much less strictly regulated than today. If San Francisco were to make its land use rules more laissez-faire, it would probably be a net plus for the environment.
There is an ongoing battle between what might be called “scientific environmentalism” and “romantic environmentalism”. The latter favors closing down nuclear power plants, restricting construction in attractive San Francisco and West LA neighborhoods, and banning GMO foods that require less land, pesticides and herbicides. Can you guess which side I favor?
PS. Even Houston is not entirely laissez faire, but it does allow a lot of infill townhouses in the closer in neighborhoods:
READER COMMENTS
robc
Jan 24 2019 at 12:49pm
No. In a true free market, lots of people couldn’t afford sprawl.
Its a weird combination of government regulations and subsidies that lead to sprawl.
Dylan
Jan 24 2019 at 1:21pm
It is not clear to me that either lot size or overall metro density are the best measures that popularly align with what people are thinking about when they consider metro sprawl. In fact, I’d think that lots of single family homes on small lots, spread out across a wide geographic region in a way that makes mass transit impractical gets a lot closer to what people are imagining when you talk about sprawl. Consider the top 3 California cities on the list. L.A. and San Jose clearly are the kinds of cities that define sprawl. San Francisco isn’t, but only because the geography of the city makes the kind of sprawl you see in the other two not available. You have sprawl right outside, but by then you’re basically in San Jose.
New York on the other hand isn’t really like that. You have super dense housing in all the boroughs (minus SI), but then you drive 30 minutes outside the city in almost any direction and you can be in a pretty low density area. Aesthetically, this kind of setup is definitely my preference, and in the age of the personal automobile it isn’t clear to me that it would emerge organically. That doesn’t mean I want to force people to develop cities in the way that I prefer…but it does mean that the kind of zoning and other regulation that make these kinds of cities possible is pretty far down my list of concerns.
Hazel Meade
Jan 30 2019 at 10:09am
I agree. When people talk about sprawl, they aren’t talking about lots sizes. They are talking about having lots of subdivision developments far from the metro center, generally strung out along a highway where all of the commercial areas are located. The subdivision have no shops in them themselves. This mode of development tends to mean that commercial areas can’t be accessed on foot, which means that people have to get into their car to drive there. I.e. neighborhoods are not “walkable”. There’s no shops in walking distance, so people don’t walk around, which means people tends to interact less with their neighbors, get out of their houses less, and get less exercise. Etcetera. In other words, “sprawl” is not about density per se. It’s about this “highway-subdivision” mode of housing development.
Peter Gordon
Jan 24 2019 at 2:24pm
“Sprawl” is vague and pejorative. The Los Angeles urbanized area (UZA) has been the densest in the U.S. since the 1980s. One should not characterize an area that houses millions by a single index. There are all sorts of densities throughout the areas (cities?) you mention. The mix of densities and land uses is much too complex to be guided by planners and their crony capitalist developers. The mix is necessarily emergent. It emerges at high cost in the cronyist world we live in.
Floccina
Jan 24 2019 at 5:30pm
These are great points:
I’m a technophile so I see GMO and nuclear as reducing environmental impact, while many see those as environmental threats. What is known is so far they have been great.
Hazel Meade
Jan 31 2019 at 10:37am
Thank goodness someone finally came up with a way to differentiate them. I’m totally going to steal “scientific” vs. “romantic” environmentalism.
Benjamin Cole
Jan 24 2019 at 10:53pm
There must be a law in American libertarian circles not to touch the “third rail.”
That is, never mention and condemn “property zoning.”
L.A (and many other cities) may be dense by some standards, but up to 75% of developable land is zoned single-family detached. Okay, so the houses are getting squished together now, and some townhomes built, etc. Architect-smarties lampoon resulting McMansions. Some people rent out their garages as housing.
Housing prices skyrocket.
The basic problem is property zoning, and the alienated right of property owners to develop their own property. In short, build millions of apartments and condo units along the West Coast, NYC and Boston.
We hear a lot of huffing and puffing from libertarians, and even the Federalist Society, about rights. Evidently, the Federalist Society has nearly packed the Supreme Court and will get another seat should Ruth Ginsburg pass on.
Even should Ginsberg leave the Court, I doubt the libertarian-constitionalists will overturn the 1926 Supreme Court split-vote ruling that held property zoning constitutional.
In any political circle, property zoning is not a polite topic of conversation.
There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians when neighborhood property zoning is under review.
Mark Z
Jan 24 2019 at 11:07pm
As has been explained before, this is patently false. Libertarians discuss zoning regularly, more than any other political grouping. Google ‘zoning’ at Reason, Cato, or FEE. There are myriad plenty of talking about zoning. You could go on any libertarian forum or site, google zoning, and almost invariably come up with a mention if not a full post article on it in the past few months.
Jon Murphy
Jan 25 2019 at 6:27am
In the comments section of a post talking about, and condemning an argument for, zoning (and byban author who regularly writes about zoning), you complain no one talks about zoning…
Hazel Meade
Jan 30 2019 at 10:12am
It’s strange that Mr. Cole seems to have made it a personal mission to troll libertarian websites, when he knows so little about what libertarians think.
robc
Jan 25 2019 at 9:06am
I mentioned it in the very first comment to this article.
Yeah, not by name, I originally wrote zoning and changed it to “government regulation” to be more broad based.
Mark Z
Jan 24 2019 at 10:56pm
Housing regulation in major cities definitely seems to reduce rather than increase density. I’m inclined to attribute the relatively low population density of many less regulated cities to the fact that those cities – usually in the southwest – are basically all newer, less developed cities. The cities on the east and, to a lesser extent, west coast have had much longer to develop and accumulate dense metro areas. Old cities are also (or were historically) closely associated with particular geographical features, such as rivers (Chicago, Boston, DC) or natural ports (New York and the Bay area, for example). Newer cities whose development is not shaped by 19th or early 20th century geographical/industrial features can just grow out into the desert (the southwestern cities).
Dylan
Jan 25 2019 at 3:42am
This is part of the story I’m sure, but don’t neglect the role of the automobile. Before that it wasn’t practical to live 20+ miles from where you worked, so there was a more natural incentive to develop dense. But with a car you could afford to live farther away, have more space, a yard and all that, and still make it to work in a reasonable amount of time. Which is I think the primary limiting factor for the growth of cities. I think an hour commute each way is about the upper limit that most people are willing to commute for work daily. In the lack of other restrictions, I think individuals try to optimize within those limits and often contradictory goals (i.e. I want a lot of space and neighbors that aren’t very close, but I want to be close to shopping and work, in a good school district, affordable, etc…) If you work in NYC, that optimization will likely put you within 5-10 miles of your work, and near a subway line, but it will probably still take you 45 minutes to an hour to get to work. If you’re in Houston, it might be that you’re 30 miles or more away from work, but the commute time remains the same. Of course, the government is providing the commuting infrastructure for both commuters. If that was left up to private businesses to provide, it isn’t clear to me which type of city would emerge.
Matthias Goergens
Jan 25 2019 at 7:32am
It’s not just the automobile itself, but that road usage for both driving and parking is underprized and cross-subsidized.
(Most governments interfere in public transport even heavier, of course.)
Most metro areas in eg the US would be much denser in a more laissez-faire scenario, at least judge by the increase in land value you see whenever a plot has its restrictions on buildings loosened every so slightly.
Dylan
Jan 25 2019 at 9:03am
“Most metro areas in eg the US would be much denser in a more laissez-faire scenario, at least judge by the increase in land value you see whenever a plot has its restrictions on buildings loosened every so slightly.”
Could be, but I’m not sure. The evidence you site of a plot of land increasing in value with less restrictions on it tells part of the story, but of course the transportation subsidies remain constant or might even increase for that area in conjunction with the loosening land restrictions. If both building and transportation were laissez-faire, it isn’t clear to me how new metros would develop. Are there any examples in the modern world that primarily utilize privately built and maintained transportation infrastructure?
MarkW
Jan 27 2019 at 7:35am
It’s not true that commuting and suburban sprawl only became possible with the rise of the automobile. In the US, suburbs served by ferries and railroads have been around for close to 200 years.
Dylan
Jan 28 2019 at 7:16am
Yes and no. Sure suburbs existed for a long time before, but the nature of mass transit guided them in pretty specific ways, so that development wouldn’t be far from a railway extension or a ferry terminal. Roads and cars made it much more possible for suburbs to extend in all directions, and at a further distance from city centers than what was otherwise practical. I’m sure there were other factors that contributed to the rise of the suburbs in the post-war era, but the car certainly seems like a major enabling factor.
LK Beland
Jan 25 2019 at 3:52pm
An example of an area where I used to live, where there is a transition from multi-family housing to single-family housing:
Before 1940, areas near the streetcar terminal (streetcars used to be privately owned, btw) were densely built. A developer tried to build similar housing on the other side of a large park, about 1 mile away from the dense neighborhood (i.e. 1.5 miles from the streetcar terminal). This was a financial disaster.
After WWII, the neighborhood was developed as a “model neighborhood”, built with car-based transportation in mind. These were small houses (less than 800 sqft) on small lots (3000 sqft or so). It had a lower density than the streetcar-based neighborhood, but a higher density than many of the figures that you mention in this weblog post.
Thaomas
Jan 26 2019 at 2:21pm
Well, I guess there are lots of “environmentalists,” but I think the consensus is that there are many policies that prevent denser development. No only does zoning and parking obligations in new construction sometimes discourage or prohibit more dense urban development but cities do not price public roads for either use, congestion, or occupancy.
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