European Tribune

Retrofit Suburbia?

Yes   4 votes - 50 %
No   2 votes - 25 %
Not No   1 vote - 12 %
Not Yes   0 votes - 0 %
Both Yes and No   0 votes - 0 %
Neither Yes Nor No   0 votes - 0 %
Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies   1 vote - 12 %
 
8 Total Votes
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by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Tue Jul 1st, 2008 at 11:14:03 PM EST
Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?

Why can't people just buy electric cars, replacing most of the existing fleet in, say, ten years, and then continue as now?

Building a new light rail system is pretty expensive and relies on either a newly constructed development that borders the newly constructed rail system (as was the case in the 1930s in the eastern U.S.), or relies on a long-term change to the housing setup. In the latter case, you build a rail line through an existing suburb, change the zoning rules, and then in about 50 years the housing will have shifted to be closer to the rail line. This sort of time scale might not be useful in the current situation.

What needs to happen, I think, is, first, a considerable rework of the electricity distribution system so we can get enough electricity from West Texas and Eastern Colorado moved over to where the people live. Then, second, we need to convince our planning agencies to allow mixed development.

A shining example of how not to plan a new community is exemplified by the proposed Banning Lewis Ranch development, east of Colorado Springs. This is a huge old cattle ranch that has been purchased by a developer and is currently planned to be yet another typical suburb. It's an excellent candidate for a correctly-planned city, because there is literally nothing out there right now at all. Not even dirt roads, just 21000 acres of open space.

http://www.banninglewisranch.com/the-ranch/location-map/main-village-interactive-maps/

by asdf on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 09:00:51 AM EST
Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?

Because peak oil is not the only reason suburbs need to be retrofitted, just the more urgent one ?

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 09:04:30 AM EST
[ Parent ]
What other reasons? People like to live on 1/4 acre of land that they "own." They can mow their grass, heat and cool their house, and get to work using electricity, so what forces a change to a more compact city?
by asdf on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 09:15:43 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Is more dense living even possible in much of the US ? If commercial developments can't be close to habitations and public transit is non-existent, of course suburbia is going to be the more attractive option - if you need to drive anyway, at least get the garden. But with semi urban and urban environment more accessible, maybe people would choose them.

Among other factors, there's one mentioned in the Yglesias posts : elderly population is booming, and driving might not be best for all of them - giving them an option beyond the retirement home could be an idea.

There's the workability of large scale cities : the cars may be electric or gas, but Los Angeles can't grow much more anyway. You can't build enough roads to satisfy an ever increasing traffic.

Also, the land use of suburbia is non-negligible, and one day may need to be used to actually feed people...

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 09:46:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Its possible if its allowed ... that is the argument above.

And, further, its possible to structure the settlement system so that the same density does not involve as many miles of individual transport.

Of course, the above argument only looks at one dimension of the transition ... it does not involve the ongoing transition we are going to see to a larger share of the population living in more densely populated urban cores, nor what should be done in terms of newly established developments (though with pervasive opportunities for effective infill redevelopment, the pressure for newly established developments is reduced) ... but you increase the average density by increasing the density of existing settlement wherever it lies on the distribution.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 10:41:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I live in a US city. There's plenty of good housing available here. Also lots of public transport. I do think that, yes, cities can become much more dense. Most any American city I've lived in can use more density. Here in Buffalo they are destroying 12,000 homes this year, and they have another 50,000 to destroy over the next several years.

I don't think there's a public transport problem here.

by Upstate NY on Thu Jul 3rd, 2008 at 08:38:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]
This is framing it as if the choice is between 1/4 acre of land that is owned, and not, with no other change.

But establishing a regulatory system that mandates that everyone in a suburb lives on 1/4 acre of land that owned, also established consequences in terms of higher drive time (and progressively growing, because sprawl development is a dynamic system that grows traffic) and lower disposable income.

So if some people prefer shorter drive times and higher disposable income, and there is a trade-off between 100% suburban sprawl development and 80% suburban sprawl development where the latter offers the option of shorter drive times and higher disposable income ... why not offer people the choice?


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 11:04:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Retrofit Suburbia Redux (none / 0)
Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?

Understand that "continuing as we are now" is driving progressively longer distances per person per year, on average.

There are renewable energy sources that can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied fuel. But there is not an unlimited amount of that electricity ... the flip side of indefinitely renewable is a given amount to harvest per year.

And if we devote all of the newly harvested renewable power to increased power consumption, then it is not available to replace increasingly expensive fossil fuels ... both increasingly expensive in terms of marginal production and User costs, and increasingly expensive in terms of recognizing ongoing negative externalities.

OTOH, especially in low gas tax countries where there have been the heaviest sprawl subsidies like the US and Australia, a program of completely replacing existing suburbia, tearing it all down and building new on a different model, presumes an abundance of natural resources.

Retrofitting suburbia is reorganizing space in suburbia so that suburban houses are moved closer to their own local central place, as farms in this part of the US that were settled before the days of the railroads were each relatively close to their own little hamlet, by seeding those local central places into the suburbs.

Obviously its going to work better with a heavy dose of bribe than with efforts at across the board mandates. Here, the leverage is provided by the fact that projects like trolley buses, tram/trains, light rail, Aerobus, are more capital intensive and have much more of their costs centralized into the operating concern, so that they are "expensive" to start-up even where they are cheaper overall than the current transport system.

That means that if Federal subsidies comes at the cost of requiring zoning amendments within 1/4 mile (400m) of designated transport stops and within 1/2 mile (800m) of designated major transport stops, there are going to be some takers for that money. From there, its a demonstration effect ... areas with higher public transport corridor usage have higher locally retained incomes and therefore strong local employment multipliers than areas with higher public/private car usage. Providing a way for developers to make more money in a rising fuel cost environment than the current system of mandating and subsidizing sprawl ensures the spread of the system nationwide.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 09:30:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]
If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher  

They can't.  

The US is not putting up enough solar panels and windmills--I mean, it's not even close--to power the existing electrical infrastructure, let alone adding millions of electric cars.  

Indeed, if the cost of oil-heating exceeds the cost of electric space-heaters, we are looking forward to the Northeast grid going down this winter.  (I know the Midwest is separate from the NE grid,) but everywhere has the same deep problem:  Under privatization nobody wants to be responsible for transmission lines, and transmission capacity has not kept up with generation and usage.  

Electrical cars are certainly more efficient than internal combustion vehicles.  But that is relative.  In an absolute sense, they are not an efficient way to move people at all.  

by Gaianne on Fri Jul 4th, 2008 at 03:57:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]
One of the things I noticed in the Paris suburbs is that the first development around the suburban railway stations was independent houses sprawl at the beginning of the century ; and the more dense neighbourhoods, that were built later where Paris itself had filled up, were built farther from the railway stations - very inefficient...

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 09:49:32 AM EST
Yes, if the above is required as a string attached for Federal funding, it steps around that problem by automatically laying the growth path where infill development can occur on a lot by lot basis around the transport corridor stop.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 10:43:17 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Great diary, Bruce

What you have proposed is very similar to what actually happened in the San Fernando Valley from the 70s through the 90s, mostly minus the transport part.  When we moved to Van Nuys in 1980 many of the major streets, the ones with four or more lanes, with or without medians, were zoned R1--single residence dwellings.  Others were zoned C1--commercial.  

Then the city rezoned the property along the R1 major streets to R4--multi-story dwellings--apartments or condos. The population was growing, and there was a finite amount of buildable space.  Many of the new arrivals needed apartments and couldn't afford to purchase a house in the L.A. market.  Homeowners were either happy to sell or had their grief assuaged by the premium that apartment developers were willing to pay.

Since then L.A. has invested in heavy rail and multiple light rail lines.  They have added dedicated bus corridors and they had Freeway Flier Busses by 1990 that left from a few select locations where there was available parking and ran to downtown.  My son took these buses while in college.  Most of that clientèle wore suits and carried briefcases.  The areas around transit stops do undergo redevelopment to greater density, if they don't already have high density.

But the neighborhood associations are a real problem.  The other problem is getting from the nearest station of stop to your final destination.   The transportation equivalent of the communications system "last mile problem."  Perhaps gas at $5.00/gal and rising will concentrate the minds of enough citizens to enable a solution.    

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

by ARGeezer (argeezer a in a circle yahoo dot com) on Wed Jul 2nd, 2008 at 11:21:57 PM EST
... to be a substantial enough increase in property value to be near a dedicated transport corridor to flip some property owners from NIMBY to PIMBY ... "Please In My Back Yard".

The proposal here is a clustered amendment to single-use residential zoning ... and if it is single-lot multiple use at 4x single-residence density, then by proportion 20% higher density residence is 5% of existing property, to raise the property value of all the single-use residential property in the local area.

Of course, the hard part is to get it up and running somewhere ... established as an over-riding rule in some state (states, after all, can establish over-riding rules for local zoning) ... or as a string attached to some federal funding for some form of dedicated transport corridor. Once successful examples get established, then it becomes a cat-herding device ... that is to say, the way that you herd cats is by holding up a nice smelly piece of bologna.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Thu Jul 3rd, 2008 at 12:08:15 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Can we really discuss transport without discussing infrastructure in some of these older suburbs?

Cheap housing materials, cheap city water pipes, cheap everything has created a nightmare for suburban communities that are failing.

Older cities have much stronger pipes (lead, usually) and are not experiencing the sorts of massive public works headaches I've heard of in some suburbs.

by Upstate NY on Thu Jul 3rd, 2008 at 08:41:10 AM EST
... driver for clustered concentration.

The system of hook up fees for utilities, designed to "encourage development" at a time that development=suburbanization was axiomatic, combined substantial direct subsidy of infrastructure for things seen as "employment centers" like industrial and office parks, with implicit cross-subsidization from more dense to less dense development.

However, when that infrastructure has to be replaced after the sprawl development has been entrenched, there is less of the denser development that is more efficient in terms of utility networks to repeat the cross subsidy ... and the entrenched institutions for subsidizing green field sprawl development don't help very much for major maintenance or rehabilitation of existing infrastructure.

The transport grid is just one grid where pockets of higher density can reduce network costs per resident.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Thu Jul 3rd, 2008 at 11:43:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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