AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
From the Star:
PRO
Planners denying reality
`Smart-growth' ideologists' claims about less pollution, better quality of life unproven
Sep 01, 2007 04:30 AM
Wendell Cox
Special to the Star
The way most people in Canada and the West live – in suburbs, pejoratively called sprawl – has become the target of urban planning. Strong, even draconian, land restrictions have been introduced in a number of metropolitan areas.
Toronto has been among the more recent. This has struck a chord, not least among beneficiaries who want to be the "last to move to the suburbs," in the words of a Washington Post writer. The "spiffy" marketing name "smart growth" has been adopted for this campaign. Unfortunately, smart growth is mainly rooted in ideology that denies reality. This is to the great risk of people, cities and the future.
Take, for example, the policy objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Smart growth says people will have to live at higher densities and use transit instead of cars. The reality could not be more different. A recent University of Sydney (Australia) study, for example, associated higher per capita GHG emissions with the highrise condominiums planners love, and lower emissions with automobile-oriented suburbs. Unlike other studies, this one used a comprehensive review of consumption, rather than the let's-pick-what-we-don't-like approach, which focuses only on transport and land use.
The U.S. Department of Transportation agreed that a Seattle light rail line would take 45 years to "pay back" the GHG emissions from construction. Finally, if all Canadians were to give up all driving, the resulting GHG reduction would be only one-half the reduction required to meet the Kyoto Accord commitment. This may not be orthodoxy, but it is the reality.
The reality is that suburbanization and the car have been associated with an unprecedented expansion of wealth in high-income nations. Home ownership has risen from approximately 40 per cent before World War II to more than 65 per cent today. This has led to a virtual "democratization of prosperity," that would not have occurred without the suburban development on cheap fringe land that the planners demonize. Further, the cars have provided mobility to rapidly access virtually the entire urban area, something impossible when cities had only transit.
The bottom line is that, despite all of their platitudes, no planning regime has ever proposed a workable transit plan that would replicate the mobility of the automobile or the urban economic productivity it has created. That is why car use will expand wherever people prefer more comfortable lives, whether in high-income Toronto or lower income cities such as Manila and Mumbai.
Smart growth claims to produce benefits such as less traffic congestion, less air pollution, lower housing prices and a better quality of life. Back to reality – Santa Claus is more likely to deliver the presents next Christmas.
Take, for example, lower housing prices. The U.S. government-funded Costs of Sprawl – 2000 predicted that smart growth would reduce average new house prices by more than $10,000 between 2000 and 2025 relative to "business as usual" (measured in constant 2000 dollars). In results that suggest that "Wrong Way" Corrigan may be the patron saint of planning, house prices have risen $120,000 relative to traditionally regulated markets just between 2000 and 2006.
The destruction of housing affordability is the most severe consequence of smart growth. As lower interest rates and permissive lending practices have spread, demand for housing has increased. In this environment, a two-tier housing market has developed – one that can supply the demand and one that cannot.
In the liberally regulated, non-smart growth markets, houses remain at approximately three times annual household incomes, not much different than 10 years ago. This includes the three highest- demand metropolitan areas with more than 5 million population in the high-income world – Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
It also includes Montreal and a number of other urban areas in Canada and the U. S. In each of these markets, liberal regulation has allowed the supply of housing to respond to the higher demand.
In the other tier, the hyperinflating markets share a single characteristic – smart-growth policies and related regulations. Smart growth rations land, through urban growth boundaries and other restrictions, all of which raises land prices. This is consistent with economic theory. When demand rose, the smart growth kept these markets from allowing supply to respond sufficiently and prices rose inordinately.
Nonetheless, smart-growth promoters are in denial on this effect. However, some of the world's leading economists have recently reconfirmed that the law of supply and demand has not been repealed. This includes Kate Barker, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, and Arthur Grimes, chair of the board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
The smart-growth plague has destroyed affordability throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and in some North American markets (such as Vancouver). Today five to 15 years of additional median household income are required to purchase the median-priced house in a number of markets, compared with just a decade ago. This converts to a household cost of between $500,000 and $1 million (including mortgage interest and inflation). This reverse-Robin Hood effect is redistributing wealth from younger to older and from less affluent to more affluent.
A report published by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank concludes that markets with more restrictive land-use policies experience less economic growth than would otherwise be expected. Nearly 4 million people have moved from less affordable U.S. metropolitan areas to more affordable areas in just six years, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Growth has become so stunted in unaffordable Sydney that both Brisbane and Melbourne could be larger by 2050. New South Wales, called the "first state" and the economic driver of Australia, now ranks last in economic growth.
All of Toronto's future growth will be from among young households, most of whom see hopes of owning their own homes and climbing on the ladder of economic opportunity slipping away because of policies that pretend economics doesn't matter. It is time to put an end to this nonsense.
Wendell Cox is a transportation consultant and principal of Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
_______________________________________________
CON
We must exit road to crisis
Big trouble awaits if we keep segregating land uses and building suburbs for the car
Sep 01, 2007 04:30 AM
Mark Winfield
Special to the Star
The Greater Golden Horseshoe region – bound by Peterborough, Kitchener-Waterloo, Barrie and Fort Erie – is the focal point for population and economic growth in Ontario. The region's population is projected to expand by 3.7 million people over the next 25 years, making it one of the fastest-growing urban regions in North America.
The region's population growth is increasingly going to the suburban periphery, where low-density, automobile-dependent residential and commercial development dominates. Assessments of the likely consequences of continuing on this path of sprawl present a dire picture of the region's future.
The projections include accelerating suburbanization of the most significant concentration of prime agricultural lands in Canada and intense stresses on important natural heritage features and drinking water sources such as the Oak Ridges Moraine. These impacts will be coupled with dramatic increases in automobile use while the role of transit declines, resulting in crippling congestion and major increases in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
The situation has put the region at the centre of intense debates over the future direction of urban development. Academic, business, municipal and environmental leaders have recommended a "smart growth" development model for the region. Such an approach would focus on the redevelopment of existing urban areas, such as former industrial sites, strip malls and parking lots, before paving farmland. It would also seek to mix land uses so it is possible to walk rather than drive to work, shops and schools, and emphasize transportation alternatives to the automobile.
For its part, Ontario has introduced a series of what it has termed smart growth initiatives, ranging from the protection of the Oak Ridges Moraine and a broader 728,000-hectare greenbelt, to a substantial increase in spending on public transit.
The province's actions have prompted vociferous, if predictable, objections from some quarters of the development industry and a few sprawl-addicted municipalities. Challenges have also arisen from a few voices arguing that car-dependent sprawl is an efficient use of land that improves housing affordability, responds to consumer demand and gives residents increased mobility via their cars.
These observers argue that the policies the province has adopted will increase housing costs by limiting the supply of land available for development at the urban periphery. They also contend that transit is only a viable transportation option in areas of extremely high density, and that moving toward these sorts of densities will increase traffic congestion in urban areas.
None of these arguments hold up under close scrutiny, especially in the context of Southern Ontario.
Sprawl is anything but an efficient use of land. The separation of housing, employment, services, shops and schools that characterizes such development is highly inefficient. Because everything is "just a drive away," daily activities guarantee road congestion.
The distances between destinations and poor connectivity of roads means other transportation options, such as transit, cycling and walking, are not viable. The high transportation-related GHGs that go with sprawl are an indicator of the poor energy efficiency of these arrangements.
The supposedly lower costs associated with living in sprawling communities are equally illusionary. Low-density developments at the urban periphery may offer lower up-front prices for housing.
However, when the transportation costs associated with living far from employment centres are taken into account, the overall living costs turn out to be significantly greater than in the higher density, mixed-use urban core.
Moreover, the region's worst traffic congestion doesn't occur in the well transit-serviced, high-density urban core of downtown Toronto, but rather in the low-density, auto-dependent 905 region.
The higher prices for housing in higher density communities with easy, non-automobile-based access to employment, services and recreation are, of course, a reflection of the strength of market demand for such options.
Nor, in the case of Southern Ontario, can one make the argument that the lands that are being turned into sprawling developments are of low value for other purposes.
More than 90 per cent of the development projected to occur over the next 25 years will be on prime agricultural lands, with nearly 70 per cent being on Class 1 land, the best farmland in the country.
Having denied the existence of problems that residents of sprawling communities experience every day, critics of alternatives to sprawl offer little in the way of solutions. Essentially they endorse a business-as-usual, laissez-faire approach to land-use planning along with the perpetual outward expansion of highway and road networks.
The real question in the minds of many of those who have studied these issues in detail is not whether Ontario needed to intervene to change the region's development path, but rather whether the province went far enough to curb sprawl.
The 2006 census data released by Statistics Canada earlier this year suggests that the channelling of population growth to the region outside the City of Toronto is even more pronounced than was assumed when the province's new land-use policies were drafted.
The much-vaunted greenbelt, for its part, largely left lands already zoned for development untouched. These areas amount to a stock of land sufficient for decades of sprawling development. Almost as much again was left as unprotected countryside between the greenbelt and existing urban areas. Beyond the greenbelt, intense pressures for ``leapfrog'' sprawl-style subdivisions in rural areas are emerging in places such as Simcoe County. The province has yet to respond effectively to these developments.
At the same time, the province has been studious in avoiding the even bigger underlying question of the capacity of the region's environment to sustain the projected levels of population and economic growth. Many of the region's water sources, for example, are already being used at or near their capacity to just support existing development.
The stresses of climate change will make the situation even worse.
The notion that we can proceed on the basis of taking growth as a given, and successfully ``manage'' it, even employing a smart growth strategy, is open to serious challenge in the face of such considerations.
That may be the most difficult question of all and one we have yet to actually address.
Dr. Mark Winfield is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at York University.
AoD
PRO
Planners denying reality
`Smart-growth' ideologists' claims about less pollution, better quality of life unproven
Sep 01, 2007 04:30 AM
Wendell Cox
Special to the Star
The way most people in Canada and the West live – in suburbs, pejoratively called sprawl – has become the target of urban planning. Strong, even draconian, land restrictions have been introduced in a number of metropolitan areas.
Toronto has been among the more recent. This has struck a chord, not least among beneficiaries who want to be the "last to move to the suburbs," in the words of a Washington Post writer. The "spiffy" marketing name "smart growth" has been adopted for this campaign. Unfortunately, smart growth is mainly rooted in ideology that denies reality. This is to the great risk of people, cities and the future.
Take, for example, the policy objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Smart growth says people will have to live at higher densities and use transit instead of cars. The reality could not be more different. A recent University of Sydney (Australia) study, for example, associated higher per capita GHG emissions with the highrise condominiums planners love, and lower emissions with automobile-oriented suburbs. Unlike other studies, this one used a comprehensive review of consumption, rather than the let's-pick-what-we-don't-like approach, which focuses only on transport and land use.
The U.S. Department of Transportation agreed that a Seattle light rail line would take 45 years to "pay back" the GHG emissions from construction. Finally, if all Canadians were to give up all driving, the resulting GHG reduction would be only one-half the reduction required to meet the Kyoto Accord commitment. This may not be orthodoxy, but it is the reality.
The reality is that suburbanization and the car have been associated with an unprecedented expansion of wealth in high-income nations. Home ownership has risen from approximately 40 per cent before World War II to more than 65 per cent today. This has led to a virtual "democratization of prosperity," that would not have occurred without the suburban development on cheap fringe land that the planners demonize. Further, the cars have provided mobility to rapidly access virtually the entire urban area, something impossible when cities had only transit.
The bottom line is that, despite all of their platitudes, no planning regime has ever proposed a workable transit plan that would replicate the mobility of the automobile or the urban economic productivity it has created. That is why car use will expand wherever people prefer more comfortable lives, whether in high-income Toronto or lower income cities such as Manila and Mumbai.
Smart growth claims to produce benefits such as less traffic congestion, less air pollution, lower housing prices and a better quality of life. Back to reality – Santa Claus is more likely to deliver the presents next Christmas.
Take, for example, lower housing prices. The U.S. government-funded Costs of Sprawl – 2000 predicted that smart growth would reduce average new house prices by more than $10,000 between 2000 and 2025 relative to "business as usual" (measured in constant 2000 dollars). In results that suggest that "Wrong Way" Corrigan may be the patron saint of planning, house prices have risen $120,000 relative to traditionally regulated markets just between 2000 and 2006.
The destruction of housing affordability is the most severe consequence of smart growth. As lower interest rates and permissive lending practices have spread, demand for housing has increased. In this environment, a two-tier housing market has developed – one that can supply the demand and one that cannot.
In the liberally regulated, non-smart growth markets, houses remain at approximately three times annual household incomes, not much different than 10 years ago. This includes the three highest- demand metropolitan areas with more than 5 million population in the high-income world – Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
It also includes Montreal and a number of other urban areas in Canada and the U. S. In each of these markets, liberal regulation has allowed the supply of housing to respond to the higher demand.
In the other tier, the hyperinflating markets share a single characteristic – smart-growth policies and related regulations. Smart growth rations land, through urban growth boundaries and other restrictions, all of which raises land prices. This is consistent with economic theory. When demand rose, the smart growth kept these markets from allowing supply to respond sufficiently and prices rose inordinately.
Nonetheless, smart-growth promoters are in denial on this effect. However, some of the world's leading economists have recently reconfirmed that the law of supply and demand has not been repealed. This includes Kate Barker, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, and Arthur Grimes, chair of the board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
The smart-growth plague has destroyed affordability throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and in some North American markets (such as Vancouver). Today five to 15 years of additional median household income are required to purchase the median-priced house in a number of markets, compared with just a decade ago. This converts to a household cost of between $500,000 and $1 million (including mortgage interest and inflation). This reverse-Robin Hood effect is redistributing wealth from younger to older and from less affluent to more affluent.
A report published by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank concludes that markets with more restrictive land-use policies experience less economic growth than would otherwise be expected. Nearly 4 million people have moved from less affordable U.S. metropolitan areas to more affordable areas in just six years, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Growth has become so stunted in unaffordable Sydney that both Brisbane and Melbourne could be larger by 2050. New South Wales, called the "first state" and the economic driver of Australia, now ranks last in economic growth.
All of Toronto's future growth will be from among young households, most of whom see hopes of owning their own homes and climbing on the ladder of economic opportunity slipping away because of policies that pretend economics doesn't matter. It is time to put an end to this nonsense.
Wendell Cox is a transportation consultant and principal of Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
_______________________________________________
CON
We must exit road to crisis
Big trouble awaits if we keep segregating land uses and building suburbs for the car
Sep 01, 2007 04:30 AM
Mark Winfield
Special to the Star
The Greater Golden Horseshoe region – bound by Peterborough, Kitchener-Waterloo, Barrie and Fort Erie – is the focal point for population and economic growth in Ontario. The region's population is projected to expand by 3.7 million people over the next 25 years, making it one of the fastest-growing urban regions in North America.
The region's population growth is increasingly going to the suburban periphery, where low-density, automobile-dependent residential and commercial development dominates. Assessments of the likely consequences of continuing on this path of sprawl present a dire picture of the region's future.
The projections include accelerating suburbanization of the most significant concentration of prime agricultural lands in Canada and intense stresses on important natural heritage features and drinking water sources such as the Oak Ridges Moraine. These impacts will be coupled with dramatic increases in automobile use while the role of transit declines, resulting in crippling congestion and major increases in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
The situation has put the region at the centre of intense debates over the future direction of urban development. Academic, business, municipal and environmental leaders have recommended a "smart growth" development model for the region. Such an approach would focus on the redevelopment of existing urban areas, such as former industrial sites, strip malls and parking lots, before paving farmland. It would also seek to mix land uses so it is possible to walk rather than drive to work, shops and schools, and emphasize transportation alternatives to the automobile.
For its part, Ontario has introduced a series of what it has termed smart growth initiatives, ranging from the protection of the Oak Ridges Moraine and a broader 728,000-hectare greenbelt, to a substantial increase in spending on public transit.
The province's actions have prompted vociferous, if predictable, objections from some quarters of the development industry and a few sprawl-addicted municipalities. Challenges have also arisen from a few voices arguing that car-dependent sprawl is an efficient use of land that improves housing affordability, responds to consumer demand and gives residents increased mobility via their cars.
These observers argue that the policies the province has adopted will increase housing costs by limiting the supply of land available for development at the urban periphery. They also contend that transit is only a viable transportation option in areas of extremely high density, and that moving toward these sorts of densities will increase traffic congestion in urban areas.
None of these arguments hold up under close scrutiny, especially in the context of Southern Ontario.
Sprawl is anything but an efficient use of land. The separation of housing, employment, services, shops and schools that characterizes such development is highly inefficient. Because everything is "just a drive away," daily activities guarantee road congestion.
The distances between destinations and poor connectivity of roads means other transportation options, such as transit, cycling and walking, are not viable. The high transportation-related GHGs that go with sprawl are an indicator of the poor energy efficiency of these arrangements.
The supposedly lower costs associated with living in sprawling communities are equally illusionary. Low-density developments at the urban periphery may offer lower up-front prices for housing.
However, when the transportation costs associated with living far from employment centres are taken into account, the overall living costs turn out to be significantly greater than in the higher density, mixed-use urban core.
Moreover, the region's worst traffic congestion doesn't occur in the well transit-serviced, high-density urban core of downtown Toronto, but rather in the low-density, auto-dependent 905 region.
The higher prices for housing in higher density communities with easy, non-automobile-based access to employment, services and recreation are, of course, a reflection of the strength of market demand for such options.
Nor, in the case of Southern Ontario, can one make the argument that the lands that are being turned into sprawling developments are of low value for other purposes.
More than 90 per cent of the development projected to occur over the next 25 years will be on prime agricultural lands, with nearly 70 per cent being on Class 1 land, the best farmland in the country.
Having denied the existence of problems that residents of sprawling communities experience every day, critics of alternatives to sprawl offer little in the way of solutions. Essentially they endorse a business-as-usual, laissez-faire approach to land-use planning along with the perpetual outward expansion of highway and road networks.
The real question in the minds of many of those who have studied these issues in detail is not whether Ontario needed to intervene to change the region's development path, but rather whether the province went far enough to curb sprawl.
The 2006 census data released by Statistics Canada earlier this year suggests that the channelling of population growth to the region outside the City of Toronto is even more pronounced than was assumed when the province's new land-use policies were drafted.
The much-vaunted greenbelt, for its part, largely left lands already zoned for development untouched. These areas amount to a stock of land sufficient for decades of sprawling development. Almost as much again was left as unprotected countryside between the greenbelt and existing urban areas. Beyond the greenbelt, intense pressures for ``leapfrog'' sprawl-style subdivisions in rural areas are emerging in places such as Simcoe County. The province has yet to respond effectively to these developments.
At the same time, the province has been studious in avoiding the even bigger underlying question of the capacity of the region's environment to sustain the projected levels of population and economic growth. Many of the region's water sources, for example, are already being used at or near their capacity to just support existing development.
The stresses of climate change will make the situation even worse.
The notion that we can proceed on the basis of taking growth as a given, and successfully ``manage'' it, even employing a smart growth strategy, is open to serious challenge in the face of such considerations.
That may be the most difficult question of all and one we have yet to actually address.
Dr. Mark Winfield is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at York University.
AoD
