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California’s War on the Suburbs

Image: NYTimes

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial critical of Jerry Brown’s policies toward the suburbs. Jerry Brown is the Attorney General of California, and is accused of

using coercion to create the demographic patterns he wants. In recent months, he has threatened to file suit against municipalities that shun high-density housing in favor of building new suburban single-family homes, on the grounds that they will pollute the environment. He is also backing controversial legislation - Senate bill 375 - moving through the state legislature that would restrict state highway funds to communities that refuse to adopt “smart growth” development plans. “We have to get the people from the suburbs to start coming back” to the cities, Mr. Brown told planning experts in March.

As the article points out, this is contrary to Californians’ wishes.

The problem is, that’s not what Californians want. For two generations, residents have been moving to the suburbs. They are attracted to the prospect, although not always the reality, of good schools, low crime rates and the chance to buy a home. A 2002 Public Policy Institute of California poll found that 80% of Californians prefer single-family homes over apartment living. And, even as the state’s traffic jams are legendary, it is not always true that residents clog roads to commute to jobs in downtown Los Angeles or other cities.

The argument over suburbs is closely tied to transportation policy. The anti-suburb side of the debate is embodied by organizations like Streetsblog who advocate for “smart growth” and “livable streets”. In a recent post, Streetsblog quotes from a Florida Globe and Mail column that expounds on the reasons for suburban decline:

The creative economy is giving rise to a new spatial fix and a very different geography – the contours of which are only now emerging. Rising fuel costs are one thing, but in today’s idea-driven economy, it’s time costs that really matter. With the constant pressure to be more efficient and to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So the most efficient and productive regions are the ones in which people are thinking and working – not sitting in traffic. And, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, commuting is among the least enjoyable, if not the single least enjoyable, of all human activities.

This argument is compelling, but we haven’t exactly seen a mass exodus from the suburbs yet. Falling home sales don’t mean that people are moving away, it means people aren’t buying houses. This point may still play out, and Streetsblog would undoubtedly be happy to see the death nail in suburban coffins, but I wonder if they have asked themselves if that is what they really want?

Vastly more housing is available in the suburbs than in the inner cities, and vastly more workers live in the suburbs. If these people move back into the city, what do you think that huge demand will do to property values? It will be great if you’re rich enough to already own property, but everyone else will be living in slums because that will be the only affordable thing around. Slums generally aren’t “walkable communities.”

As the Wall Street Journal points out:

people living in nodes — Pasadena, Torrance, Burbank and Irvine — often enjoy considerably shorter average commutes than do a lot of inner-city residents. Many of these people commute through tangled traffic to get to jobs on the periphery.

Census data supports this. In terms of raw numbers, vastly more suburban dwellers enjoy shorter commutes than city dwellers. If you look at commuters in proportion to the raw numbers, there isn’t an overwhelming advantage to living in the city either. Roughly 31% of urban residents have less than 15 minutes to commute, while 27% of suburban residents do. For 15-30 minute commutes, the numbers are 34% city to 33% suburban respectively. 2.5% more suburban residents suffer through 30-44 minute commutes, but that number represents about 1.8 million workers – where do you think they’re all just going to go assuming they wanted to move into the cities?

These numbers hardly represent a huge advantage to city living, and let’s not forget the inconvenience that comes along with life in the city. A Streetsblogger commenting on the Florida Globe and Mail article writes:

I used to live in Atlanta and even a trip to the grocery store to get a gallon of milk took about 20 minutes when you factored in the drive, parking, going to the store, and coming back. As a teen in the suburbs I was driven to school, to soccer practice, to friends’ houses, to the mall, to the movies, and more. In the city, almost everything is a lot closer.

I think that’s one reason why the suburbs have failed that has little to do with gas prices and almost everything to do with how we value our time. Especially in the newer cities in the sunbelt, you need to get in your car to do just about everything.

If valuing your time is important, perhaps you should examine what you have traded. In a car in the suburbs, I can drive and pick up an entire week’s worth of groceries. Now let’s say that accumulating groceries for the week takes longer than a milk run, so let’s add an hour and say it takes 1 hour 15 minutes. That’s an hour and 15 minutes per week I have to spend getting groceries. If I divide that by 7, that means I spend 10.7 minutes per day on grocery shopping.

By contrast, walkable cities are defined by the proximity of amenities to your residence - .25 miles or less is the optimum. Let’s say it takes you about 7.5 minutes to walk a quarter mile – a respectable 2mph pace. Thus it takes you 15 minutes just to walk back and forth to the store to get your groceries. So your trip didn’t save you any time in the short term, and you still have all the same disadvantages while in the store. Let’s say it takes you 8.5 minutes to round up the stuff you need for the day (one seventh of my time), and you’ve spent 23.5 minutes shopping for one day – it took you twice as long as me. It’s much worse in the long run since you can’t carry the same amount of groceries I get in one trip; you would have to go back to the store 7 times, which means your grocery commute for the week runs 164.5 minutes compared to my 75. So who’s the big loser when it comes to how I value my time? And in saving an hour and a half over you, I also don’t have to subject myself to the whims of the weather.

Consider the lack of actual benefit alongside the following revelations:

Mr. Modarres also points out that forcing developers to build near transit lines, a strategy favored by “smart-growth advocates,” does not mean residents will actually take the train or bus. A survey conducted last year by the Los Angeles Times of “transit oriented development” found that “only a small fraction of residents shunned their cars during rush hour.”

There is also little punch behind the science used to justify the drive to resettling the cities — and plenty of power behind the argument that suburbs are better for Mother Earth. Several prominent scholars — including University of Maryland atmospheric scientist Konstanin Vinnikov, University of Georgia meterologist J. Marshall Shepard and Brookings Institution research analyst Andrea Sarzynski — have found there is little evidence linking suburbanization to global warming, pointing out that density itself can produce increased auto congestion and pollution.

The antisuburbanites also ignore evidence that packing people together in cities produces “heat islands.” Temperatures in downtown Los Angeles sometimes reach as much as three degrees centigrade higher than outlying areas. Recent studies in Australia have shown that multistoried housing generates higher carbon emissions than either townhomes or single-family residences because of the energy consumed by common areas, elevators and parking structures, as well as the lack of tree cover.

It suddenly becomes clear that the debate about cities versus suburbs boils down to personal choice, not to societal benefit, and that’s where it should stay. We shouldn’t be legislating or coercing people to make “smart (and unproven) choices” that are only smart for the people who want to tell you how to live your life. We should be expanding all infrastructure to meet demand, and we should provide more choices, not less, to our citizens.