By Request: Missing the Trees
John Bedell writes:
I work in downtown DC but live in the Baltimore suburbs and ride down on the MARC train. Whenever I read you waxing on about the joys of urban living, I think, “but big buildings are ugly.” I could live in a townhouse neighborhood, provided there was adequate parking, but I just couldn’t live in a big building surrounded by other big buildings. The atmosphere is grim and oppressive. So I wonder, do you like it, do you not care, or do you miss having space and greenery around you?
I grew up in an apartment in Manhattan and didn’t actually realize how much I like to have a little greenery around until I moved to a rowhouse neighborhood in DC and got my hands on a small backyard. Now I live in an apartment that has a largish internal courtyard, and precisely because I put a high value on that kind of thing I was glad to be able to get a unit that has a door which opens directly on the courtyard. Which is to say that a certain level of appreciation for green space is by no means incompatible with a preference for city living. Even in Manhattan! There’s a reason, after all, that people who can afford them really like to get direct views of Central Park or Riverside Park.
Obviously, though, what’s available in the city isn’t going to be enough for many people. And personally while I recognize a lot of virtues to New York City, I prefer living in a smaller city. And others will prefer small towns or rural areas or suburbs. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Getting planning policy right isn’t about saying that there’s one kind of neighborhood that people ought to live in. Indeed, just the reverse. It’s about saying that public policy shouldn’t be aimed at exclusively promoting a particular vision of car-only suburbanism. If we had the mirror-image of our current policies—it’s illegal to build parking lots or garages, there’s no money available for work on roads, no structure can occupy less than 90 percent of its lot, no building can be shorter than six stories, no home can have more than 2,000 square feet—that would be stupid and bad. It would be bad in different ways and for different people, but it would still be bad. That, however, isn’t the situation we have.
78 Responses to “By Request: Missing the Trees”
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January 17th, 2009 at 10:40 am
The irony of this is, most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi and much of the Northwest are temperate rain forests. Left alone, this environment sprouts trees in great quantity; keeping it clear of forests requires constant human intervention. Look at any abandoned property in an Eastern city — there’s probably one with a mile of Matt’s place in DC — and you can see the forest growing back.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:48 am
In my neighborhood (in Harlem) there are several housing project type buildings built around courtyards or open areas w/ many nice trees. It’s very similar to how apartment blocks are built in many Russian cities. Obviously it won’t be as high-density as it could be but it’s much nicer, still high-density, better for the environment, and give people nice places to meet up. I’d gladly live in one of those buildings.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:52 am
The quoted comment misconstrues what it means to live in an urban environment. Like many people, they confuse (urban) density with big buildings. And while that is one way to achieve density, it isn’t a very desirable one. More importantly, it isn’t a *necessary* way.
In fact, the kind of density that is needed for urban living, but is still within the realm of livable cities can be achieved with building heights of 3, 4, 5 or six stories.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:53 am
—it’s illegal to build parking lots or garages, there’s no money available for work on roads, no structure can occupy less than 90 percent of its lot, no building can be shorter than six stories, no home can have more than 2,000 square feet—
Except the money available for roads comes from the people who use roads (i.e gas tax) and all the zoning laws are imposed by local governments in their inhabitants interests. Anyways aren’t you just advocating the status quo? Planning policy isn’t exclusively pro-suburbanism. On a federal level it is more concerned with interstate trade (i.e. highways, trains, airplanes…), as it should be, but I see no reason why at the state or city level urbanism isn’t given the attention it deserves. And to say that pro-urban zoning doesn’t exist is just false.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:04 am
allbetsareoff – not all forests are rain forests – I seriously doubt anywhere east of the Mississippi gets enough rain to be a rain forest – though there is a rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula, if I remember correctly.
Matt – what if rowhouses and tree-lined streets would disappear absent zoning? New York City has tall buildings and whatnot, but it also has neighborhoods like Park Slope that would probably be towers if people were allowed to build them. As it happens, I like Park Slope the way it is, but I recognize that it would be denser absent zoning (or in this case, I believe, designation as a historical area or something). So what I’m saying is, what if you need density-unfriendly zoning in order to get a diversity of neighborhood types?
January 17th, 2009 at 11:06 am
…and now that the House appropriators have released their stimulus plans, we can see that transit and rail are shafted in favor of highways again.
Same as the old boss…. sigh.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:07 am
> [orig commentator]
> I could live in a townhouse neighborhood, provided there was
> adequate parking, but I just couldn’t live in a big building
> surrounded by other big buildings. The atmosphere is grim and
> oppressive. So I wonder, do you like it, do you not care, or
> do you miss having space and greenery around you?
I don’t mean to be critical, but after many years of living in city neighborhoods, suburbs, central city, small town, and suburbs again, and working closely with people who live in all those environments, I find it is consistently the exurb dwellers who use phrases such “The atmosphere is grim and oppressive” rather than “I find the atmosphere grim and oppressive”.
Tell one of your city-dwelling coworkers that you live on a farm 2 hours commute away and he will mostly likely say something like “That’s cool. It’s not for me, but I imagine that way of life has a lot of advantages. Could my kids come out to see the farm some Saturday?”. Tell one of your exurb-dwelling coworkers that you like dense, diverse, vibrant city environments and he will mostly likely say “I don’t know how you can stand the dirt, noise, etc.”; invite him to bring his children to the city for a day and he will report you to the child welfare agency for endangerment. It it moving to or living in exurbs that makes people so intolerant of difference, or do people intolerant of difference tend to move to exurbs? The people I knew who grew up in 1960s inner-ring suburbs were mostly there because their parents didn’t like living near people of the wrong ethnic group, but for all their prejudices they were aware of difference and weren’t afraid to deal with it.
> McKingford at 10:52
> The quoted comment misconstrues what it means to live in an
> urban environment. Like many people, they confuse (urban)
> density with big buildings. And while that is one way to
> achieve density, it isn’t a very desirable one. More
> importantly, it isn’t a *necessary* way.
>
> In fact, the kind of density that is needed for urban
> living, but is still within the realm of livable cities can
> be achieved with building heights of 3, 4, 5 or six stories.
Actually, walk around the Chicago neighborhood where Rod “Jailbird” Blagojevich lives (Blaggo moved on the block where a friend of mine lived so I know it fairly well). It is about 60% single family homes (with yards! corner houses like Blaggo’s even have garages!), 30% 3-flats, and 10% 3- and 4-story walkup apt blocks with courtyards and light wells of the type Matt describes. Quite dense, supports a lot of specialty stores and restaurants, quiet, trees, multiple parks within a four block walk. “Oppressive”? Somehow I don’t see it.
It is true that the areas right around commuter tracks tend to have a lot of taller/denser buildings, but there are both economic and social reasons for that.
Cranky
I am almost sorry Mixmaster lost his counter-blogging job; I miss having him tell me that that neighborhoods such as I describe not only don’t but can’t exist even after I provide Google Map links!
January 17th, 2009 at 11:08 am
All right, I can admit when I’m wrong – apparently there are temperate rain forests in the eastern US. They are small and scattered, though, a far cry from “most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi.”
January 17th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Cranky Observer Says:
Just read that over again and look at the irony of who is truly ignorant – the exurbanite, or the man who made up the hypothetical conversation.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am
I’ve lived in cities like Berlin (big city) and Graz, Austria (small to medium size town). Both are just as green or greener as say, a Houston suburb like Katy, TX, despite being a hell of a lot denser. True, there’s fewer grassy lawns, but a lot more trees and beautiful parks.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:14 am
I grew up in a row house in Brooklyn with a small backyard. RIght after my folks moved in, they got a tree planted on the street in front of the house. Both of these things were visually nice (and the tree keeps one side of the house nicely shaded in summer), but more important was our proximity to Prospect Park. The park is massive, and closed to cars on weekends, which makes it a perfect place to run, bike, play softball or baseball, walk your dog, etc.
This is all to say that, in my experience, what’s more important than having a super large backyard or huge setbacks with well manicured lawns, is small amounts of some sort of greenery in your immediate proximity, and larger, multi-use, communal green spaces somewhere within real walking distance. That’s all definitely achievable in the urban context.
What I don’t particularly care for are open green spaces that are intentionally unusable — spaces without benches, for instance. It seems like this is to prevent homeless people and other down-and-out undesirables from using the spaces, but this probably gets it backwards. If you create a space that people want to use, that has a way to preventing it from being taken over as some kind of needle park…
January 17th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Um, Gordon, how much of the cost of a road is actually provided for by the gas tax?
January 17th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Cranky – I think the key to the kind of neighborhood you describe (plenty of single-family homes, but dense enough to support stores, restaurants, etc.) is a high-income population. To put it another way, I think what matters in terms of specialty stores and restaurants is density of disposable income, not density of people. So yeah, a sort of medium-density neighborhood like the one you describe can support that stuff, if enough rich people live there. That’s not a prescription that can be applied across the board, though. What you want are sustainable dense neighborhoods that can persist even if they don’t house a lot of rich people.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:16 am
> or the man who made up the hypothetical conversation.
That is a paraphrase of about 10,000 such conversations I have had with coworkers over the last 20 years, so nothing hypothetical about it. Ponder the irony of who is truly ignorant – the person who reports honestly what he observes, or the man who treats city-dwellers with contempt.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 11:16 am
I grew up in a far Chicago suburb in the 50’s. We drove to grandmothers house on the South Side a few times of year. by the age 6 or so I developed a dread of the big city. It was ugly, you couldn’t see the horizon and it stunk. No politics or anything about so many people. I just engendered in me, an innocent, a feeling of dread. When I got into my teens this faded and later it is absent. Still I have never lived in a large city and surely never will. I’d rather live in the Nebraska Sand Hill than NYC.
http://www.bostonstormchaser.com/Day2-03.jpg
Point being I am certain many many people never overcome the simple dislike I had of the city with it’s ugliness, hemmed inness and smells.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:21 am
> Cranky – I think the key to the kind of neighborhood you
> describe (plenty of single-family homes, but dense enough to
> support stores, restaurants, etc.) is a high-income
> population. To put it another way, I think what matters in
> terms of specialty stores and restaurants is density of
> disposable income, not density of people. So yeah, a sort of
> medium-density neighborhood like the one you describe can
> support that stuff, if enough rich people live there.
I am a little unclear as to why such a neighborhood requires “rich people”? The neighborhoods I describe were built from 1920-1940, and are mostly unchanged since then. In the 1960s and 1970s they were viewed as places where people too poor or too set in their ways to move to the suburbs would eke out their unpleasant existences; even as late as 1980 the house were Blaggo lives was probably selling in the $100k range. The neighborhoods were populated by immigrant families, recent college graduates, and retirees.
Since then, as Atrios and Matt have both pointed out, the desirability of such places has been recognized and prices have tended to go very high (although you can still find affordable apartments). But that is because, as Atrios has also observed, no more of them are being built not because they are intrinsically expensive.
You do need access to decent public transportation though. In Chicago most neighborhoods on the north side have walkable access to the L; on the south side the commuter railroads or a strong bus network.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 11:22 am
So Cranky you have been reported to Child Protective Services 10,000 times over the years? Otherwise, it was a hypothetical, and it shows that you think of country folk as backwards and ignorant, and it really shows your contempt for them. It also shows your prejudices because you extrapolate out from one hypothetical coworker to an entire population living in the suburbs and exurbs. So absent hearing the actual conversations with your coworkers I am left with the only evidence of contempt – your interpretation of a hypothetical conversation you created and extrapolated to show your true bigotry.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:25 am
“Point being I am certain many many people never overcome the simple dislike I had of the city with what I personally perceived to be it’s ugliness, hemmed inness and smells.”
Fixed that for you.
Cranky
Personally, as a city kid the first time I drove past a Nebraska feedlot I came close to making a vow never to return to the West – you could smell it from 30 miles away and it was a good thing you could still drive 100 mph in Nebraska in those days. Luckily I overcame that and enjoy the rural West quite a bit, but let’s be careful with the characterization.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:27 am
> Otherwise, it was a hypothetical, and it shows that you
> think of country folk as backwards and ignorant, and it
> really shows your contempt for them.
The “contemptuous” and “look down at” memes can only be used once in a conversation. I engaged in a pre-emptive strike and used them first to describe exurbanites’ view of city dwellers; therefore you cannot use them in this conversation. Hurts, I know, but that’s the rules. Sorry.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Actually Cranky it can be used more than once in a conversation by changing the domain. In this conversation you used it to describe a hypothetical person, the imaginary domain if you will. I used it to describe an actual person, you, the real domain if you will.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I think the options discussed here point directly to the difficulty we may have getting anything done with the recovery.
To envision something that will work in our society we need to get beyond the insulation of our own secure states. We (most of us) live in a “city of choice” figuratively speaking. Most people live in a “city of necessity” — in metrosprawl or under-served and impoverished city neighboroods.
What we need is a Barack Apollo Project which would consist of contests to design and make politically viable entirely new models of human settlement. These would draw on the ideas of Christopher Alexander for producing structures people are actually drawn to and which the value. These communities would be car free in their central areas. They would integrate residencess with services such as early education and preventative care clinics.
They would be large enough to accommodate and make cost effective the tools for a sustainable green energy input and for onsite recycling. It could have green inside and on the perimeters, including gardens for those inclined to that.
The creation of the technology for such integral communities would be the key to the global resurgence of our capacity to lead economically.
Unfortunately I see little of this hinted in the way the money is going to be used and efforts to impress this on the relatively insulated persons who will be deciding things have not been successful. I am assuming the Web is where this seismic shift in understanding planning will take root.
The elites in the city of necessity are almost incapable of seeing the appeal of such new communities. Those confined in cities of necessity have no problem at all understanding what a truly sustainable community would look like.
If all we do is retrofit our disfunctional society it will not change because we will still fail to see.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I am more familiar with Chicago, but here is another city neighborhood where I visited friends after college. Somewhat more family-oriented, so fewer trendy restaurants (and more pancake places), 10x denser than the typical suburb yet with quite a few trees. They seem to have some open space too
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 11:38 am
One interesting thing about Matt’s original post, and about this thread, is that almost no one is celebrating the sort of environment you see on Manhattan, where you have blocks and blocks of contiguous 10+ story buildings.
There are a lot of people who like the sort of 2-to-6-story density you see in DC, or in slightly smaller Eastern cities. But no one is writing in to praise vertical walls of glass.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:38 am
gordon gekko, January 17th, 2009 at 10:53 am:
The first half of this is a flat out lie, and the second half is highly implausible.
There are some people whose roads are paid for out of gas taxes, but the aggregate road spending figures are bigger than the aggregate gas tax receipts, so it can’t possibly be “all”. The reality is that city and small town streets receive relatively little gas tax revenues, and are provided for mostly out of local sales and income taxes, while the gas taxes paid by those residents cross subsidize suburban and rural US routes, state routes, and county and township highways.
Of course, in most of the area paying the cross subsidy, the most effective means of adding transport capacity is to provide transport alternatives to driving, reducing the share of the population using the road, since roads alone are incapable of supporting the densities of foot traffic needed for healthy urban population densities.
On the notion that zoning is adopted that is tuned to the needs of local residents, firs, there is the fact is that most local communities adopt their zoning from standardized models, with little or no amendment, and second, it assumes that all stakeholders are equally effective in getting their interests taken into consideration, when in most localities there is a pronounced bias toward the perceived interests of developers. And since tax law and “development subsidy” practices are biased toward subsidizing sprawl development, developers ought to be expected to have the same bias.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:39 am
So Gordon Gekko
When a certain suburb decides to resurface the street in front of your house, how much of that gas tax is the suburb getting and using on the project?
January 17th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I want to go on record strongly supporting Cranky’s healthy and wholly arbitrary prohibition against using anti-elitist memes twice in the same thread.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:41 am
“a sort of medium-density neighborhood like the one you describe can support that stuff, if enough rich people live there.”
These neighborhoods do tend to be high-income, but this certainly has not always been the case. Correlation does not imply causation. Could it not be that these neighborhoods tend to be high-income simply because the supply of them is so low and the demand so high?
A middle-class family with a teenager could save thousands a year if they were able to sell one of the three cars they are required to own in a suburban environment. Smaller lots mean less land to own, care for, pay property tax on. Shorter commutes translate to more time for work, less gas expenditures. I think there may be a little money left over to walk down the street and support the neighborhood restaurant now and then. It’s all a matter of prioritization.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:46 am
> There are some people whose roads are paid for out of gas
> taxes, but the aggregate road spending figures are bigger
> than the aggregate gas tax receipts, so it can’t possibly be
> “all”. The reality is that city and small town streets
> receive relatively little gas tax revenues, and are provided
> for mostly out of local sales and income taxes, while the gas
> taxes paid by those residents cross subsidize suburban and
> rural US routes, state routes, and county and township
> highways.
There is also the question of where the roads (and sewers) came from the in first place. I watched the 2nd-ring suburbs of Chicago be built around 1970. The infrastructure for those burbs had to be paid for by the residents and businesses of the central cities of Illinois because there wasn’t anywhere else for the money to come from at that time. So the urban-dwellers paid for what would become their own scaffold and rope in the 1975-1985 period (of course, Chicago rebounded and is doing well, but most other cities in similar circumstances did not).
Cranky
Funny thing is that those 2nd-ring suburbs are now viewed as “too close” and undesirable! The 1st-ring suburbs are considered part of “the city” and in a previous era would have been annexed to become so legally – that is how Chicago was originally created.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Cranky – my point is that shops and restaurants are a function of disposable income, not pure density. Maybe Blagojevich’s neighborhood was poor at one time, and maybe it had just as many shopping and dining options then as it does today. I think the more common experience, though, is that neighborhoods that are poor and dense tend to have fewer shopping and dining options than neighborhoods that are affluent and medium-density. The way a lot of medium-density neighborhoods get good shopping and dining options is by housing a lot of people who spend a lot of money, but this means that the model has limited applicability when you don’t have a lot of high-income residents.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:49 am
You can’t maximize density (efficiency) at the expense of the built and natural environments. There are cultural and historical aspects to the environment that you destroy at your peril.
The breaking up of Eastern forests by suburban development has endangered the songbird population and caused a population explosion of large birds, such as the geese that flew into the engines of a commuter jet the other day, according to the NYT.
In Maryland an experimental program of allowing strips of uncultivated native grasses alongside of cultivated fields, (combined with a more judicious and moderate use of agricultural chemicals). This resulted in an unexpectedly rapid resurgence of birds and flora that had been endangered or even thought to be extinct.
We need to do something analogous with our landscape — plan for long, uninterrupted strips of forest and greenery alongside a judiciously planned, less energy hogging development, if we want to bring back the song birds and restore the ecological health of our environment. As far as the cities themselves, the example of European cities demonstrates that urban parks, community gardens, balconies, and small back and front yards (that are actually used and not chemically manicured for show) are not incompatible with higher density development.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Am I missing something, or doesn’t the whole Cranky-minderbender argument just boil down to “rich neighborhoods tend to be nicer than poor ones”?
January 17th, 2009 at 11:58 am
It’s about saying that public policy shouldn’t be aimed at exclusively promoting a particular vision of car-only suburbanism.
This is incorrect. Most zoning ordinances do not just promote car-only suburbanism — they mandate it. There is only one flavor available allowed.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:59 am
> Am I missing something, or doesn’t the whole Cranky-
> minderbender argument just boil down to “rich neighborhoods
> tend to be nicer than poor ones”?
No, I don’t think so. My contention is similar to Duncan Black’s, in that we view neighborhoods such as Blaggo’s in Chicago (and similar ones in Boston, NYC, etc) as “rich” today because they have high property values, expensive trendy restaurants, and boutique stores. But in 1975 those neighborhoods were considered undesirable, had relatively low property values (not destroyed-neighborhood low, but low compared to a similar property in Oak Lawn IL at the time), and the commercial spaces had diners serving $1.49 egg-and-toast breakfasts and small family grocery stores. It was the desirability of the place that eventually attracted the wealth, not the wealth that created the environment.
There is a problem in that since 1970 the entire economy of the small grocery store has vanished (except in NYC) and groceries are now either Megafood or Whole Paycheck with nothing in between. That does pose a problem for family living with zero to 1 cars. Zipcar could be an alternative there, but it is a problem.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
1) $1.49 in 1975 = $5.68 in 2007, which is damn expensive for egg and toast. I could buy a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread for that kind of cash.
2) You could enlighten us on which neighborhoods were undesirable in 1975 that are now filled with rich people. The only one I can really think of is Hyde Park, where they basically kicked out the blacks and invited them back as hired help to clean up after the rich people that moved in.
3) To find out why the small grocery store failed read Theodore Levitt’s 1960 Marketing Myopia where he explained 50 years ago why they had failed by then. That would be 10 years before you say the decline started.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Well, Cranky, I agree with you actually.
I should have been more precise: it seems to me that minderbender’s critique boils down to “rich neighborhoods tend to be nicer than poor ones.”
January 17th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The inner city DC neighborhoods where I’ve lived (Adams-Morgan, the Kalorama and Lanier Heights ends; Logan Circle) are greenier than most of the 50s ‘burb where I grew-up or the Hartford exurbs where I lived in the early 80s.
The important thing is functionality. Many urban neighborhoods have lost it if they’ve lost population or become overwhelmed with poverty–you lose basic services and they’re difficult to get back. The gentrifying area of Atlanta where I used to live lacked a decent grocery store, bank branch, or drug store. The not very good hardware left when the neighborhood upgraded and was replaced with a mediocre over-priced restaurant and several similar establishments popped up in previously utilitarian retail spaces. Some places are like that–in Atlanta restaurants are the mark of a neighborhood that’s coming back, not neighborhood services. I had to go a few miles away to find a decent cleaners.
Unfortunately, small towns have become suburbanized and lost their functionality. The college town where I went for undergrad once had a dime store, a JC Penney, and a small grocery downtown, with three big groceries almost in walking distance from campus. Now everything is carcentric and I can’t imagine how basic needs get met for someone w/o a car, and college towns often have held on to functional centers better than most of their peers.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I think JimboSlice has mastered the art of “death by 1,000 non-sequiturs.”
January 17th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
> The inner city DC neighborhoods where I’ve lived (Adams-
> Morgan, the Kalorama and Lanier Heights ends; Logan Circle)
> are greenier than most of the 50s ‘burb where I grew-up or
> the Hartford exurbs where I lived in the early 80s.
In fairness that is also a function of time: I saw some pictures taken in 1890 of a Chicago neighborhood where I lived for a while – it was brand-new then, and the trees were just tiny stick next to the sidewalk. Today it looks quite different with mature trees and developed parks, but any new living area will look new for 30 years.
Cranky
Say, if anyone can find me a $5.68 breakfast here let me know. That is 3/8th mile from where my spouse used to work as a waitron at a cut-price diner in the early 80s.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Seems an odd thing for that person to write about or Matt to blog about. There are many reasons to reconsider the value of cities, favorably, in light of political priorities today, from equity to mass transit to climate change. But the old debate over whether cities are cool or suburbia is just so much freer doesn’t seem worth rehashing.
fwiw, though, it seems a mistake for him to focus on height, both because obviously many tall buildings have great esthetic value (why are histories of architecture so full of skyscrapers, and why do tourists come to NYC?) and because they’ve nothing to do with a concern for greenery and open spaces, an entirely different question. And in some schemes, height is a way of reducing horizontal density.
As for other tradeoffs, as a city dweller I never found the suburbs more open. You get your tiny patch of green, your yard. Then you’re cut off and surrounded by roads. Here you get out and walk, and the whole city with tons of parks (not to mention culture) is open to you, along with the lack of the proverbial suburban uniformity (from housing to food). No wonder suburban kids can’t wait until they’re old enough to drive.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Have a look here (or if that doesn’t work type “Berlin” into google maps, turn on satellite view and zoom in) and tell me if that’s enough trees for you.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Ted,
OK, I’ll desist, but this was as much fun as toying with Mixmaster.
One last hit: I did a bit of Googling in the interval and found this. In the early days of on-line porn (before general use of the Internet – dial-up BBS days) the world’s largest provider of such was located in the building just to the west of where this cafe is now. That building itself has a Cold Groin (Gold Coin) diner in the corner space that served the kind of cheap meal JumboHotDog claims didn’t exist. No decent person, man or women, would linger in that area nor was there much in the way of $7.75 mezza plates to be found in the area.
Cranky
The lack of a preview function on Yglesias’ blog must be destroyed!
January 17th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
And what do I do but get the link tags wrong – guess Matt’s blog doesn’t like criticism about its lack of preview. This was link 1 and this was link 2.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
no one is writing in to praise vertical walls of glass.
Well, not even Manhattan is entirely like that. Because of the density, a city block can hold more life than an exurban subdivision, which means that the kind of changes in use that you might see mile-by-mile heading in from the exurbs manifests itself over block by block. The primarily residential bits of the Upper East and West Side — not the famous parkside buildings, but the smaller streets — aren’t “the vertical walls of glass” of the Financial District. But comparatively few people actually live among the office towers.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I give up.
Unable to Link
January 17th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Mr. “John Bedell” and his antisocial ilk are free to stay the fuck out of my cities, man’s natural habitat. They will not be missed.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
We now live in an age where we can transfer information almost instantaneously across the world.
Do you think that if we could accomplish the same thing with physical matter (i.e., some type of Star Trek-like teleportation), that people would even live in large cities anymore?
January 17th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
> Do you think that if we could accomplish the same thing
> with physical matter (i.e., some type of Star Trek-like
> teleportation), that people would even live in large cities
> anymore?
Well, we don’t actually have transporters – just the Internet. But to both the real (work from home via Internet) and speculative (transporter) questions I would personally answer yes. In fact, with transporters to handle grocery delivery and garbage pickup, and no need for cars, we might see an increase in city-dwelling.
Note that about half of the commercialization of the Internet was by start-ups located in downtown NYC and Brooklyn. If they were creating a virtual world why did they have to be so close together? Synergy, shared outlook, and optimal business communication. And no disrespect to my work-from-home collegues but I see incredible inefficiencies
in human beings not being able to communicate face-to-face in the business world.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
As for other tradeoffs, as a city dweller I never found the suburbs more open. You get your tiny patch of green, your yard. Then you’re cut off and surrounded by roads.
Well, that depends on your suburb, and how you define it. I grew up in a third-ring suburb (the first tracts were laid out in the late 1970s, and it was built out through the 1980s and early 90s) and it had footpaths and cyclepaths, walkable shops, and schools and community spaces, and good public transport available from the outset. You can see development patterns on that model across Europe, but they generally require a degree of central planning (oh noes!) or regulation to prevent lawns from stretching to the kerb and other standard exurban practices.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Of course, someone concerned about plant life and greenery shouldn’t think in monolithic city vs. suburbs terms. I grew up in a suburb in North Carolina, and fortunately it was one with lots of good-sized trees and somewhat differentiated homes; it was also within walking distance of a large park. It still suffered from an infuriating lack of non-car transportation options, but it was certainly better than the newer suburban neighborhoods that had no trees to speak of and at most 3 different floorplans per development.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Cranky,
OK. So you are pushing that the reason cities exist and are desirable is because of the face to face contact?
Fair enough but I still think that people would break into more like-minded smaller enclaves.
New York is, to me, a collection of neighborhoods. Other than for commerical & infrastructure reasons, why would Canarsie and the West Village need to be geograpically proximate?
Or if people chose to live in cities, in my previous scenario, would the cost of living be more similar between urban and rural areas, particularly as it relates to housing?
January 17th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
BruceMcF,
All I am saying is the federal government is not responsible for this distortion. The Highway Trust fund, while going bankrupt, has historically paid for federal roads and more (e.g. transit, deficit reduction) using an excise tax. That is drivers pay directly for the roads they use at a federal level.
So, why should the federal government even get involved (as Matt is implicitly suggesting)? I know this sounds like a staw man argument but really I would just like this debate to be a little less disingenuous. If Matt were just saying states shouldn’t be using income tax to favour suburbs I would be much more sympathetic.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
gordon: It seems to me that there are several cogent reasons why we might want to frame federal policies that actually favor urbanism, rather than adopting a studiously neutral posture.
Energy independence and global warming come to mind for starters; also ecological problems associated with sprawl.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
People seem to think that my point is merely that richer neighborhoods are nicer than poor ones. That is not my point. The question is what level of density is necessary to support a walkable, urban environment. Remember, this all started when McKingford commented, “In fact, the kind of density that is needed for urban living, but is still within the realm of livable cities can be achieved with building heights of 3, 4, 5 or six stories.”
Cranky responded with an example of a Chicago neighborhood that is 60% single-family homes and yet maintains many of the features of an urban area, with good shopping and dining options.
So the question is, how much density is necessary for an area to be walkable and urban? If there aren’t shopping and dining options within walking distance, it’s not going to be walkable in the sense we care about.
And so my point is that you can maintain a lot more shopping and dining options when you have affluent people in the area. Walk through many poor (but highly dense) neighborhoods and you will realize that they are not walkable at all – they are dangerous, and they have very few good options for shopping and dining. So in my view, more rich people (or at least, more people with a fair amount of disposable income) mean more shopping and dining options, and more walkability.
None of this means that causation can’t run in the other direction too – that walkable areas attract rich people. But I think it would be somewhat silly to say that causation only runs in that direction, that rich neighborhoods don’t attract desirable restaurants and shops.
This matters because I don’t think you can reliably get a walkable, urban neighborhood with 60% single-family homes. I think these do exist, but they are a result of the high income of the people in those particular neighborhoods. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not simply arguing that rich neighborhoods are nicer than poor ones.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
All right, I can admit when I’m wrong – apparently there are temperate rain forests in the eastern US. They are small and scattered, though, a far cry from “most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi.”
You were essentially correct the first time. “Temperate rain forest” is usually taken to mean a region of temperate climate where the rainfall, because of mountain barriers or weather patterns, is noticably higher than the norm for temperate forests and results in foliage much denser than what humans would consider the norm for this climate zone. In other words, it is more culturally than scientifically defined. Persistent rainfall of 80″ or more in temperate climates is pretty rare.
Even without the word “rain” in the sentence, allbetsareoff’s statement is correct. The eastern US is naturally brushy and forested and you have to work hard to keep plant life from reclaiming your lawns and fields.
As an example the farm I grew up on in northern Minnesota was sold a few years ago to a family that wanted the land as a rural retreat of some sort. No cattle grazing the pastures, no farmers mowing the fields, and stands of brush and birch and popple seedlings are popping up everywhere.
Leave some space for trees, and they will grow there, wherever you are east of the Mississippi.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Wow, I just had to note my amazement at Cranky Observer’s apparently bottomless patience in dealing with some of the most thick-headed dullards I’ve ever seen.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
I too grew up in NYC, on the UWS. Had a summer house on Long Island, which really gave me perspective.
Often when I tell people where I grew up, they don’t believe me! It’s really annoying.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
> Walk through many poor (but highly dense) neighborhoods
> and you will realize that they are not walkable at
> all – they are dangerous, and they have very few good
> options for shopping and dining.
But now you are into Jane Jacobs territory here. When was Death and Life of Great American Cities published? 1962? In it Jacobs documented in detail how “modern” theories of slum clearance and development were destroying poor, but organic and self-organizing, neighborhoods and replacing them with dense yet isolated high rises. After some objections room was left for a “corner grocery store”, standing isolated and forlorn on a sea of concrete and quickly transformed into a gang hangout – because it was not a human-organized and human-controlled urban ecology but a 1950s planner dystopia.
That was written in 1962 and there has been some progress since then, but a lot of the 1950s modernism that brought us the dysfunction of Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago (and all of Brasilia in Brazil I am given to understand) still lingers on in our public thought.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
> This matters because I don’t think you can reliably
> get a walkable, urban neighborhood with 60% single-family
> homes. I think these do exist, but they are a result of the
> high income of the people in those particular neighborhoods.
> Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not simply arguing that rich
> neighborhoods are nicer than poor ones.
As I said earlier, the true urban neighborhood of the 1920s is problematic today because of the grocery store situation. With that caveat to walkable, let me know the next time you are in Chicago and I will give you a map and directions to 30 such neighborhoods encompassing 1 million or so residents.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
The West End of Vancouver, BC is one of the most densely populated areas in all of N. America, right up there with Manhattan. But it still has lots of trees and other greenery, and is a very pleasant place to walk. It’s also near a huge park (Stanley). With sensible planning, this stuff is very doable.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
It’s true that wealthier neighborhoods in the city are generally nicer than poor ones, and poverty is a big problem, but the nice city neighborhoods aren’t exclusively filled with millionaires. There are quite a few renters of modest income. Moreover, there’s actually a lot of affluence in the suburbs, at least the suburbs of Chicago. I’m quite sure that if you magically transformed them into neighborhoods of urban density, they’d be perfectly capable of supporting neighborhood restaurants, shops, taverns, etc.
I find the city very attractive, but that’s my opinion, obviously. I even like the big buildings. I prefer older two-flats and three-flats to high-rise living, but that has more to do with liking the neighborhood feel than pure attractiveness. And it’s been pointed out that high-rise living is only a small part of urban dwelling.
I think there are also attractive suburbs and rural small towns. That said, I find most new housing developments, particularly exurbans ones, unappealing. They’re more sprawling, and less neighborhood- and municipal-oriented, with less public space and less opportunity for locally owned small retail businesses. On walkscore.com, my current city neighborhood gets a score of 94. The suburb I grew up in 20 miles out of the city got 63. My friend’s place in the exurbs gets 14. That’s the direction things are moving in. I don’t find it attractive, and I certainly don’t find it very functional or sensible.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
It’s notable that there have been so few (if any) rural voices in this conversation.
I’ve lived in a rural environment for an extended stretch, and enjoyed it greatly (I now live in a small city/University town, which is also nice), and I think the closeness with nature is something that many city-dwellers just don’t seem to factor into their calculation. However, exurbanites and suburbanites seem to factor it in _even_less_. Most rural people look with a mixture of hatred and terror at those cancerous developments eating up field and forest, eutrophying ponds where the fishing was once so great, and generally fucking with the landscape. I think yo also find that the ethos of mega-capitalism (apply it to houses, cars, boats, etc.) that you find in suburbs/exurbs is strongly opposed by most rural Americans; indeed, they may be the section of our population that finds such thinking most alien and prima facie absurd (perhaps having to do with a closeness to nature that correctly understands growth without end is cancer and animals and chancre in plants).
I’m also of the opinion that, as the 21st Century proceeds, changes resulting from resource scarcity and climate change will force a lot of people back onto the land; economies of scale the sort of which you see in ArcherMidlandDaniels and so forth are just going to be less valuable than a constellation of small farms surrounding urban centers that market their crops to the city-folk.
As for the person who described cities as “humanity’s natural habitat,” I’m sorry, that just blinkered. It’s only in the last decade or so that the majority of the Earth’s population became urban. Yes, Ur and Athens and etc. were crucial early centers of civilization, but they were fed by vast agricultural hinterlands. Putting aside that fact and remembering that we were hunter-gatherers for most of our existence, it’s pretty clear that, urban boosterism aside, cities are not our “natual habitat.”
January 17th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
> As for the person who described cities as “humanity’s natural
> habitat,” I’m sorry, that just blinkered. It’s only in the
> last decade or so that the majority of the Earth’s population
> became urban. Yes, Ur and Athens and etc. were crucial early
> centers of civilization, but they were fed by vast
> agricultural hinterlands. Putting aside that fact and
> remembering that we were hunter-gatherers for most of our
> existence, it’s pretty clear that, urban boosterism aside,
> cities are not our “natual habitat.”
The counter-argument being that throughout human history as soon as the most meager surplus of food or trade goods develops cities appear. And as soon as cities appear young people start leaving the farm for them in droves. Hard to understand why that is so if farming is the natural way of life for humans.
There are probably a number of reasons why rural people don’t post much in Matt’s threads, but one reason is that there aren’t that many rural people in the United States anymore. The urban population of the US passed the rural population between the 1880 and 1890 censuses, a fact that my late father-in-law used to repeat every time we visited the farm that he and his sister got away from as soon as they could. Today I believe the number is well over 80% of the US population lives in SMSAs, and most of the rest lives in small cities and large towns surrounded by miles of outdoor food factories.
Now, hunter-gathering is a different story; I could imagine humans being happy living that life. Then again, consider the Iroquois Nation, the Mound Builders, etc. – again, plenty of land and resources for hunter/gathering yet cities or similar population centers developed.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Re: Hard to understand why that is so if farming is the natural way of life for humans.
It isn’t. Hunting/gathering is.
Historically however rural areas were less subject to epidemics (population was less dense) and provided most people with at least adequate nutrition so death rates tended to be lower, and the rural areas had a population surplus (not enough farmland for everyone) so younger sons, not having died in infancy as many urban children might, took off for the cities to seek their fortunes. Right up until the early 19th century most cities maintained their populations only by in-migration; urban death rates (mainly from disease) were so high the cities would have dwindled to ghost towns without rural immigrants.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I think any serious discussion of “humanity’s natural habitat” is probably seriously blinkered. ‘Natural’ has very little meaning here, and it’s unclear why it would be important if it did.
Humans have a complex set of physical/cognitive/emotional needs, many of which we are only dimly aware of. Rural life and urban life probably meet different ones, and it’s likely neither style quite meets all of them – though we can fix that as we learn more.
Humans DO seem to have a ‘natural’ predisposition for living near other humans though, and given the current technology landscape, that tends to mean cities. Cities also seem to be the most ‘logical’ habitat for the majority of humanity at the moment, as well as one of the only ways to enjoy quite so many other humans.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Until relatively recently (in historical terms) people stayed on the land because they were tied to the land. When serfdom was abolished in Russia, about three-quarters of Russians could be classed as “unfree labourers”, and most of those freed were still basically forced to work their patch of land.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
When the intellectually stunted speak of “nature,” usually they mean something like “with humans removed,” so let’s run with that notion here. Almost all primates live in communities with densities even greater, in a crudely measure, than the population density of Manhattan (~35 m² per individual). Among the great apes, our closest living relatives, even the relatively antisocial orangutan will organize in relatively high-density groups to search for food and shelter.
It seems highly unlikely that we alone among the primates have an instinct for living sprawled across the landscape, cut off from other members of our own species. But perhaps it’s appropriate that the people who do earnestly believe that sort of lifestyle in any way to be “natural,” these rurals living off the generosity of the urban taxpayer, also tend to be the likeliest to believe their G*d created them independently of apes. You don’t see a lot of city-dwellers beating their chests shouting “I did not evolve.”
January 18th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Re: It seems highly unlikely that we alone among the primates have an instinct for living sprawled across the landscape, cut off from other members of our own species.
Most people in exurbs live with other family members, and most of them work at jobs where they are surrounded by other people too. So they are not simply living cut off from others.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:00 am
I can remember when there were small dairy and other farmers who were our neighbors in what are now suburban areas. There were even dairy farms in my lifetime on Staten Island. It seems to me that it is beneficial to everyone when people who live in cities have farms a short distance away.
It is true that farming is arduous, chancy, and not entirely compatible with a consumer economy but in the not too distant past there were (relatively) prosperous farmers on Long Island, in New England, New Jersey, and the Midwest quite near to the big cities. They often belonged to cooperatives and other mutual benefit organizations. As a child, I played with and went to school with the children of some of these farmers.
They were not at all like the dirt poor semi-serfs and debt slaves of the Southern states or the struggling farmers of Appalachia.
The fact is that political decisions have accelerated the flight from the land in this country by making farming even more unattractive that it needs to be. Farmers do not have health insurance or pension plans, for example. Agricultural workers are not protected by labor laws in many cases.
The farm policy of the last 40 years or so has been “get big or get out.”
I think that the French and Japanese policy of helping small farmers is a smart one.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:48 am
This is the first time I recall you saying Urban living is anything less than the ideal for all of humanity.
I am not joking.
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