Some comments on urban sprawl after reading The Celebration Chronicles by Andrew Ross (the guy who edited the Chicago Gangster Theory of Life)
The author tracked Disney's planned community Celebration from the start, and he even lived there full time during the first year it was open. His book basically chronicles his experiences living in the community, and he goes into some of the scheming at Disney behind the project.
I'm quite interested in the "New Urbanism" movement, basically because I grew up in a community that was the type of community that the New Urbanism advocates are continually striving for. The community was Chestnut Hill, a rather tony suburb of Philadelphia. I doubt you've heard of it, since it has been overlooked by many of the writers on urban sprawl and the New Urbanism. It was predominantly an enclave of the elite within the city limits of Philadelphia, but there were some decently priced housing units that yours truly could afford to live in. So both the rich and the more working class coexisted in the same community...even if we were living about a half dozen blocks apart. In addition there was a central commercial core with a mix of restaurants, retailers and little mom and pop stores - with apartments above the stores as well. Finally the town was pretty compact so it was feasible to walk to most of the stores if you chose to (or had too), but the commercial core was parking friendly as well.
Community Strategies
Was this a new planned community? Not at all. It was originally a country resort area back in the 19th century (9 miles out of town) and over the years it became an enclave for "old money" Philadelphians. The servants and construction workers lived on the "other side of the tracks" but they were in the community as well. But like many fancy communities, after WW2 it had to cope with the waves of suburbanization and competition from surrounding malls and strip malls. The community did a few things that kept them from getting swept away like so many similar communities:
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The local merchant association purchased several vacant lots in the 1960's and turned them into community parking lots. The costs of the parking lots are covered by local merchants, who have to pay for the validation stickers that are used to give the shoppers free parking. Why go the mall when you don't have to go hunt around for parking in the community?
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Strict local zoning ordinances. The zoning board for the commercial district are a bunch of Nazi's - a new dry cleaner had the audacity to hang an internally lit sign in front of his store, and had to remove it after 10 days. Chain stores like the Gap and Borders were welcomed, but they had to fit the architecture of the stores in with the community. The Zoning board also was on the ball when unpleasant businesses like gas stations went out of business - they made sure to change the zoning for that lot in order to attract a more suitable business to the community.
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Community amenities. Stores are strongly encouraged to have window boxes with flowers. At Xmas the community association stings lights in the trees up and down main street. Recently the community association has begun to purchase limited development rights from local businesses - essentially guaranteeing that the current facade of the main street will remain intact for the foreseeable future. Having a high concentration of wealthy status-conscious residents can really help for those fund-raising efforts...
The community still relies on municipal police, but because many influential people live there, they get pretty good police coverage (like that's any surprise).
I'm a bit partisan since I grew up there, but I've never really seen another community like it. And what I find rather hopeful is that this community was not always so quaint - instead it has gradually become nicer and nicer over the last 40 years. They have mastered the art of weeding out undesirable buildings and businesses, and the community institutions that have emerged have really kept the process on track. Mind you, Chestnut Hill is just another neighborhood in Philadelphia - so it's institutions have had to evolve independently of the city government which has had it's own problems.
But anyway, my hometown really embodies what the New Urbanists are aiming for and since discovering that the rest of the world is nowhere near as quaint, I've been interested in their efforts.
The Celebration Planned Community
Celebration is a rather unique case. Many of the residents were very impressed with the quality of Disney products and were eager to live in a Disney style community. From the book I got the feeling that it was the inevitable dissatisfaction with the high expectations that really rallied the community - construction was shoddy because of a tight labor market in Florida, and the experimental school freaked out many upwardly mobile parents.
Tthe real glue holding the community together was apparently the desire to maintain high property values. Many of the residents had to stretch financially to move in there, and they lived in mortal terror of having their meager equity eroded by bad press, a "bad" school, or renegade community members. The author was rather concerned at the rather heavy hand the developers had in community government - they basically had a veto over any decision until a certain percentage of homes in the community were sold. It seemed like democracy with an 800 pound gorilla in the corner, but to me this seemed like a short term problem that would be rectified when the development was complete.
Public Policy Urban Sprawl Countermeasures
So what does the future hold for urban sprawl?
Well, I have no great ideas, but the very first thing I would do is overhaul the zoning codes. Why strip malls and abominations like Makiki get past the zoning board is beyond me.
I do find the Henry George theory of taxing land higher than property improvements to be a helpful idea. It would spur more concentrated development and a more efficient use of land.
Why cities and counties should have to subsidize the development process is also a mystery to me. I know many towns have begun to enact impact assessment fees to cover the cost of the water, sewage, and road pickups. These fees ought to be jacked up to fully cover the cost of infrastructure, as well as help cover the cost of extra schoolrooms or other additional demands. The developers will pass the cost on in the price of their homes, but the new residents would be able to finance the cost with a marginally bigger mortgage, deduct the interest expense on their federal taxes, and still live in a community with relatively low property taxes.
I'm skeptical about more mass transit. The suburbs have already evolved into more of a network - with lots of commuting between different edge cities for many workers. Rail lines from the cities to the suburbs just isn't going to work anymore. Creating denser communities where you don't have to have a car would be a good first step. But constructing the network of mass transit to link up all these compact communities is prohibitively expensive. The growth of Edge Cities could have been stopped in the 70's I guess, but now it seems a bit late. So many jobs have fled the urban cores that getting those jobs back to the city is going to be especially difficult.
Technological Countermeasures
Apparently half of all car pollution is caused by first mile of a suburban trip - it takes a while for the catalytic converter to heat up and start working properly. So park and ride stations for mass transit really do little to lessen air pollution. A few years ago I read about one auto maker that was researching encasing the Catalytic converter in a crystalline salt mixture which would hold the heat of the converter for up to 20 hours. The added bonus was that you could run the heater hoses through the mixture and instantly have heat when you started up the car on those cold mornings. Pretty neat, pretty simple. Why this isn't this standard issue on cars?
One high-tech idea, which is likely to come down the pike is greater information gathering and dissemination for car travelers. Many major intersections are already wired up with camera's. It's only a matter of time before they start putting in road sensors every 1/4 mile to show in which areas traffic is flowing. Tie that in with the digital navigation displays in cars that are beginning to come on line, and you could have instantaneously updated maps of the surrounding traffic patterns. With the development of a decent traffic simulation program, it could be possible to input your destination, and then have the CPU continually recalculate the shortest time to the destination, and guide you on the selected route with audio commands. If this would just tie up the secondary roads, have the traffic computer be centralized, and have it dole out alternative routes to trapped commuters. Most commuters would probably obey the new directions, but defectors could be kept in line by tracking whether they "cheat" in completing the trip, and could be kept in line by the threat of getting slower alternative routes in the future. Of course, you could finance the gear and the infrastructure with the occasional advertisement over the audio channel. (Note - this is what happens when proto-futurists get stuck in traffic on the DC Beltway...)
Written by Mark Justman Copyright 1999 Posted 9/03/99 http://go.to/futureplex
