Can US sun belt cities teach us something?
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2.5 Ha development site at 590 Orrong Rd Armadale in Melbourne, bounded by Orrong Rd (on left), oval and rail line. Council has rejected Lend Lease's proposal for 475 units (Click for street view)
Slate columnist Matt Yglesias posted an important article yesterday, In defence of the sun belt, that should be required reading for all politicians and policy-makers who’re interested in making Australian cities better. It reinforces how important it is to find ways to increase the supply of housing within our cities, especially in sought-after established areas.
He asks a straightforward question: why have US sun-belt cities like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and Raleigh-Durham grown so much faster than old, established places such as San Francisco and Boston, notwithstanding the considerable advantages of the latter?
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Matt Yglesias is a progressive so he’s not really defending the sprawl characteristic of fast-growing cities like Las Vegas. Rather, he’s asking why so many American businesses and workers are heading for new cities instead of old cities where the fundamentals are much stronger:
That’s in terms of wages, it’s in terms of the basic first mover advantage that older cities have, it’s in terms of legacy cultural and entertainment amenities, and it’s certainly in terms of the things that urbanists say make for great communities.
Why would businesses and people forego these advantages? And why, he wonders, would the old cities themselves, which have already “gone through the trouble of building the Metro and the street grid”, be prepared to settle “for a small tax base, a lack of job opportunities and a dearth of affordable housing”?
Many theories have been offered to explain the growth of sun belt cities. The list of possibilities includes a warm climate, weak environmental regulation, low unionisation, cheap air travel, cheap air conditioning, low taxes, sympathetic geography, public subsidies and the conquest of tropical diseases. There are also “push factors” associated with the older cities, like poor public schools, antipathy to apartment living, unsafe neighbourhoods, cold climate and a higher cost of living.
However Matt Yglesias says the key reason is sun belt cities actually want to attract business and population, so they make it easy to build infrastructure and housing. Land is cheap and building houses is cheap.
The older established cities, on the other hand, throttle housing supply, making it very expensive. As Edward Glaeser and Ryan Avent argue, residents of established areas employ a host of devices, including building controls, height controls and heritage controls, to deter increases in residential density.
He observes that the sun belt model is doing something right – it’s clearly working for middle class Americans. The new residents are getting houses that are large by any measure, as well as neighbourhoods they feel are safe and schools they think are good. In the sun belt cities:
Public officials and thought-leaders down to grassroots people in the community take a kind of pride in growth that leads you to sit down and say we want to work this out so that lots of houses and infrastructure get built here……(OTOH) Washington D.C. and its environs are absurdly squandering the fact that there’s high demand to locate things in and around our city. I don’t think that’s a point that’s best emphasized by highlighting the aesthetic failings of cookie cutter Sun Belt subdivisions.
There are real and potential weaknesses in the sun belt model. Some argue their characteristically sprawled settlement pattern is vulnerable to big increases in oil prices. Others that they’re built on cheap water and electricity that is vulnerable to the exigencies of climate change. Nor is it likely sprawl in Dallas is as sustainable as absorbing the same growth within older, established cities like San Francisco.
There’s an analogous pattern to the sun belt migration in Australian cities. Rather than settle in established suburbs with better access to jobs and services and even in some cases greater walkability, many people opt to locate in fringe and peri urban areas where densities are generally lower.
A key underlying cause is the same choking-off of supply as happens in America’s older cities and results in higher prices. For example, residents of Armadale in Melbourne persuaded Stonnington Council last month to rule against a 475 unit development, with buildings up to 12 storeys, proposed by Lend Lease.
This is an ideal location for housing – it’s only six kilometres from the CBD and well-served by public transport. The site in Orrong Rd is very large (2.5 Ha) and mostly abuts rail line and playing fields, not houses. Yet residents oppose the development, saying it is:
totally out of character with the heritage, low-density surrounding area of Armadale /Prahran /Toorak and would introduce CBD-type high-rise development to these suburbs
But the analogy partly breaks down because unlike sun belt cities, even the planning processes in Australia’s fringe suburbs can’t supply enough lots. With only two thirds of the required lots being built each year, the O’Farrell government is now seeking to address Sydney’s housing shortage by asking developers to nominate fringe sites suitable for the development of tens of thousands of residential lots. Many of these sites are outside established growth centres or outside areas nominated in Council growth strategies.
Ways have to be found to increase the supply of housing in Australian cities. A lot of that will come from the fringe, but much more needs to come from established suburbs. I think we have to try other approaches – I’ve suggested one before, but I’ll return to this issue again.
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Another good yarn Alan
Your readers might be interested in my post titled Double D from last year…covers similar ground
http://matusikmissive.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/double-d/
Cheers for now
Michael
A proposal to build 450 residential units on a site, that apart from the additional traffic generation has very little visual or other adverse impact on adjoining communities should be decided on what brings net benefit to the people across the Melbourne Statistical Division (MSD), and not be decided by local Councillors alone. Hopefully this site development will be decided on by the State Government in the best interest of the citizens of Victoria.
hk, I take it you haven’t come across Victoria’s Planning Minister Matthew Guy before?
Footscray on the other hand is booming with urban infill.
The Melbourne example reminds me of the proposed Canning Bridge TOD development here in Perth. It’s the first stop from the City on the new southern line, about 8km from the city and also connected to pretty good freeway and principle shared paths. Currently it is a very inaccessible station, surrounded by major roads, heavy traffic and, a low density housing.
Essentially it is the perfect location for a sizable TOD-styled activity centre. However there has been a lot of resistance in the community. This is due, to a large extent, to the greater than average proportion of high income and/or retirement aged residents in the surrounding neighbourhood. From my expereinces and contact with these people the main reasons to be against the TOD are fear/resistance of change, concerns about property values and concerns about traffic and parking congestion (already an issue in some parts due to people parking in the lcoal streets to walk to the train station). The media has also played a part in aggrevating fears, with sensationalist headlines commenting on the ‘radical’ nature of the proposed development.
http://www.planning.wa.gov.au/publications/760.asp
Building lots of housing on the urban fringe only works because of subsides for transport. At least in Melbourne looking at the map all the outer urban growth areas follow the freeways. I suspect that the US sunbelt does the same thing, the question is who is paying for the subsides. Probably not the developers who are building the houses. An Australian author has actually written a satire on fringe housing development called Blueprints For A Barbed-Wire Canoe which I keep meaning to sit down and read.
I agree with the principle of encouraging more housing to be built but I don’t agree with the principle that planning does not matter, or the ‘developers know best’ attitude. Local councils are responsible for servicing housing but have no incentive to increase population. It costs money to build new sewers and maintain roads so they tend to become hotbeds of NIMBYism and the ‘don’t do anything that could damage by property value’ attitude. The Victorian solution to this is the Kennett model of stripping councils of power over planning decisions. I would sarcastically call it the ‘let’s turn them into democratically elected garbage collectors’ solution.
There is an alternative model though that you haven’t mentioned. The German model of funding local government through federal taxes on a per population basis. This arrangement gives local government a strong incentive to increase population and hence encourage development. Have a look at the naked capitalism blog post that summarizes a report comparing the UK and German models of development.
This article sounds it was written five years ago. Many of the sunbelt cities are doing badly in 2012. Las Vegas and Phoenix are full of empty subdivisions and half-built houses. Unemployment is higher than the national average. The cities are contracting, not expanding.
Brisbane (arguably Australia’s answer to the SunBelt cities) is doing a lot better. There’s sprawl, but at least there’s some attempt to plan these days. We also have a half-decent public transportation sytem, which is better than a zero-decent public transportation system you find in Houston.
I have written my own response but thought I would first post some of the overwhelmingly hostile comments to Yglesias’ article, and which are considerably less prolix than my own efforts:
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Also Yglesias’ introduction cites this review of his own book (which incidentally is what his article is really about, including convenient links to his Amazon page):
OK, here is my overly long comment.
Almost all of the coherent comments on Matt Yglesias’ article were very critical (and much more informed than he was). The “success” was/is a chimera based on an unsustainable set of premises (sprawl, lack of services inherent in low taxes; initially subsidized roads but lack of funds to maintain them long term, an economy that depends on endless growth). A city like Phoenix should never have been built in that location–most of its water is imported over 500 miles and, despite the south-west drying up (and over-exploiting groundwater which a surprisingly large fraction of Americans depend on) the kind of people who moved to these sunbelt cities, and the kind of administrations that run them, are in denial. Hence the endless waste, for example on golf courses that proliferate in all those places; and the resistance to water conservation measures (it is what they thought they were escaping from the old cities and the pesky unAmerican regulations). By contrast California–which of course is sunbelt but older–has had quite strong water conservation policies for decades, and is the only state in the US that has, incredibly, maintained a flat line when you plot energy use per capita for 30 years–despite it being one of the fastest growing states in that period.
Also the statement:
is really twisted. As Davies observed just the other day, those older cities are far denser and all their policies are leading to increasing density, not deterring it. Though it may not always be the kind of unregulated density the developers want, eg. those 12 storey tower blocks in Melbourne where there is nothing remotely like it around the proposed development. (Or to use another very contemporary tale of developer-politician collusion: the inappropriate granting of planning permission ((by Newman in his last meeting before resigning, the development ends up in his wife’s family’s hands) for outsized apartment towers in Wooloongabba which has a perfectly good plan.) The old cities have plenty of experience at what works and what doesn’t, and what can lead to long term headaches–one of which is hi-rise tower blocks much above 8 floors. (Paris is the densest city in the western world and the vast majority of it is 6 to 8 floors. It is developer’s self-serving myth that hi-rise is needed; attention Monsieur Matusik s.v.p. ).
Finally, while the growth of the sunbelt is real, it is not quite true to talk about places like SF or even Boston or Washington DC as if they are static. San Francisco city of course defines a quite small area at the tip of the peninsula but the SF Bay Area has been a huge growth area for the last 4 decades (encompassing Oakland and San Jose, both among the fastest growing districts of California), and is now sprawled around the entirety of the bay. Even Boston has expanded hugely to swallow what were peripheral towns–like Framingham and Lowell which are now simply commuter suburbs (though those along Route 128 comprise the second largest hi-tech, especially biotech, regions of the US). Greater Boston at 4.5 million is the 10th largest metro area of the US, and the commuting area is even bigger at 7.6 million (5th largest in US); it also represents the world’s 12th largest economy so any notion that it is old, quaint and decaying is absurd. The SF Bay area is even bigger and more dynamic, but is not counted as a single MSA (you would have to add up Oakland, San Jose, Almeida, San Mateo & other counties).
And as difficult and expensive as it is, these “old” cities are extending their mass transit to their furthest reaches. The BART scheme for SF Bay Area has 40 year old plans to encircle the bay–after a 30 year battle they finally reached SFX! almost halfway down the peninsula. There is really no competition with the likes of Phoenix, Houston or Atlanta which inevitably will have to try to catch up to make up for their lack of planning.
#7,8,9 michael r james: Did you actually read what he wrote?! The title of Matt Yglesias’s piece is ironic – he is NOT defending sun belt sprawl. Quite the reverse. He is pointing out that settlers will go the sprawl route if the option of better locations is denied to them. The possibility that the sun belt model will prove unsustainable doesn’t somehow make it alright to block development in established cities/areas!!
I can’t believe you’d defend the residents of Armadale-Toorak against higher housing densities on the basis of some tired old developer conspiracy theory.
Be careful about assuming criticism of Yglesias is objective. He’s gotten himself into hot water over some ill-judged personal comments he tweeted about a conservative (Andrew Breitbart) who died last week. There appears to be a right wing “pay back” campaign to diss him generally, and his new book in particular (see Amazon). Note that the reviews on iBooks, where you have to have purchased the book in order to review it, are positive.
Alan: I’m going by what you wrote. I was baffled that there was no acknowledgment of the trouble and strife the Sun Belt cities have got themselves into through subprime mortgages and other financial shenanigans. Seriously, does the term Global Financial Crisis not mean anything to you? It started in the Sun Belt.
Yes, there is a lot we can learn from the Sun Belt – basically, how not to do it. But there may be cultural differences in play. Case in point: something like SEQ’s water rationing sounds like it would be impossible in the States. It would be deemed “socialistic” and “Unamerican” or something.
I have little interest in Yglesias – he’s one of those pundits that is encouraged to churn out pieces without checking up whether he’s been fed nonsense. He’s the Say’s Law of the blogging world. That’s why he is seen as an useful idiot by many.
#12 Down and Out of Sài Gòn: I thought it started on Wall St! Sun belt sprawl didn’t cause the GFC, it was the victim. Lower cost housing didn’t cause the GFC, bad credit and financial practises did. Reducing the cost of housing is a good thing, not a bad thing. The very point I’m making (and so is Yglesias) is that while ever the sprawl cities offer cost advantages, many people will continue to prefer their sprawled pattern, with all of its social costs, ahead of higher densities in older cities, unless the cost of housing in the latter can be lowered. One of the keys to lowering costs is to increase supply, preferably within established areas which have good services and infrastructure.
P.S. don’t be surprised if both our comments get lost in the course of this weekends IT upgrade
Ah! Increasing the supply of low cost housing in established areas that people actually want to live in is the key. Unfortunately, with the development costs, planning rules, construction requirements and union controlled building industry, that could be a pipe dream for some time to come.
Build over 3 storeys and you need a lift. A lift, you say? OK, now you need a crane and union labour (and its rules and productivity). To make this all pay we now need two more things – kennel-sized apartments and more than 6-8 storeys. The community doesn’t want the height and most people don’t want to live in expensive kennels.
Having lived in one of the 60′s 6-packs for a while I actually think something like these is the answer. 3 storeys, space for parking and a bit of landscaping, reasonably spacious units and able to be built by the home-building industry. Of course most looked pretty ugly and you would be hardpressed to build one nowadays with shading, oversight and a million other constraints. However, maybe we can do better today.
Rather than bemoaning the lack of development in established areas, we should be trying to find a parctical answer to the barriers – and bashing the greenfields isn’t an answer. Neither is closing them down (as Bob Carr showed in Sydney).
Alan: a lot of the land in the Sun Belt (and elsewhere in the US) was offered with Sub Prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgates. Little or no money down was offered. The land was offered so cheaply that the lenders were at risk of defaults and losses. That was not good for them.
To make a profit off the deals, they had the bright idea of rolling all their debt into collaterized debt obligations and selling them off to people in Wall Street. All the CDOs were now classed them as assets on the company book, and leveraged themselves to buy more stuff.
When people started defaulting on their debts (which in the US was often as easy as locking the keys in the house and walking away), the CDOs were now worth little or nothing. And a lot of Wall Street firms were now worth less than nothing. We have a GFC in the making.
One more thing about Yglesias: Breitbart supporters sound like utter neanderthals to me. They’re the people who would more likely perpetuate than complain about statements like “It’s my water, I pay for it” in the Arizona desert. Yglesias often gets bashed from the left as well as the right.
I think our local Government structure might have something to do with housing shortages. Sydney has 40+ local government areas. Especially in the inner suburbs. LGA’s are just too small to make sensible decisions about things like housing density and traffic planning. They are too vulnerable to NIMBY activists who oppose pretty much all development. As long as Sydney and Melbourne are growing cities we’re going to have to put the extra people somewhere, and they can’t all be banished to the fringes. It might be nice to live in a ‘village’ 6km from the CBD, especially if you never have to leave your suburb, but people who want to live in an arcadian idyll just have to accept they they can’t live close to the centre of a large and growing city.
I think economic self interest (via some very bad incentive mechanisms) explains the regrettable Armidale decision, and housing supply issues more generally. State and local governments have shifted from managers of property markets to exploiters of them. Ever since house purchase became a blood sport stamp duty has been one of the largest revenue items on State budgets. They don’t really want prices to drop to more affordable levels. Ditto Councils and rates revenue. Anything that might threaten valuations in an expensive leafy suburb is opposed.
As for inner redevelopment, like most here I prefer it, but I do think some proponents shoot themselves in the foot getting Grady and going for too high densities and returns. Never mind Europe, visit Portland or Vancouver and there is a lot of high quality medium density development, still very conducive to transit use, that has no more than four or five stories, not ten+ as in this case. A lot of the negative impacts are avoided then.
@Alan Davies Posted March 9, 2012 at 5:50 pm |
#7,8,9 michael r james: Did you actually read what he wrote?!
I wrote a longish reply to this, and it did initially post & show up on the site but was subsequently missing after Crikey closed everything down, so I lost interest. Given the parlous state of Crikey’s IT, I will try to keep this short and also keep a copy!
It is not clear that Yglesias was being ironic (he’s American remember!) especially when he wrote “Obviously the Sun Belt is doing something right.” Nothing ironic about that and none of the dozens of negative commenters thought so. And then he cements his opinion in his closing sentence with “to replicate Texas’ success “. He appears to have a simplistic view of the economics and should read Krugman:
But concerning the central argument, yes I side with the Armidale residents in this but not for the same reasons (well, not sure of their reasons). Developers want to impose medium-to-high rise on a low rise area; and worse is we know that they never know when to stop. In the Newstead River Park brownfield development in Briz, the original masterplan called for low-rise commensurate with the surrounding suburb–which meant the heritage Woolstore district of Teneriffe on one side and the Newstead 6-7 floors apartments on the other side. But it having been settled, including stepdowns from the 8 floors to match the woolstores where they adjoin, the developer later put in an underhanded request to go higher (on the grounds that their cleanup of the site took so long, everything had become more expensive)–and used dirty tactics as usual; they went up to a ridiculous 30 floors (because BCC seems obsessed with this number) but then “compromised” back to 15, except that they managed to retain 25 floors for the sole remaining prime riverside site (which is directly next to the woolstores). The first 15 floor building is almost complete as I look out my window. The entire site is being compromised and what could have been a fabulous high-density and high-class large inner-city urban renewal is at risk (already at the edge of the NRP site several high but low-rent buildings, one which appears to mostly be for rent-subsidized tenants, are going up. One is a Devine building, say no more.).
My position is that this Armidale development would be good at 8 floors max (though with stepdown to perhaps 4 floors at the edges), and allowing more of the site to be built on (the irony with hi-rise is that much less of the site can be built on thus not really achieving the lauded density; witness Melbourne Docklands with its useless windy unfriendly spaces). IMO that is the kind of development our cities should be looking at–and stringing them out on serious rail transit (“pearls on a string” model). Instead we get the poor Docklands and scrappy 30+ high-rise stringing along roads or on scraps of inner & fringe-outer areas; with transit being promised but probably decades away.
@Krammer56 Posted March 11, 2012 at 10:20 am |
Build over 3 storeys and you need a lift.
No. At least part of the reason for Hausmannian Paris topping out at about 8 floors (includes mansard floor, ie. roof) is that it is still manageable by stairs–just. (I lived on the 5th floor without a lift and will attest to the fact that, though one grumbles sometimes, it is not really so bad. One also sees that old people must be kept fit because plenty of them live in such buildings.) But perhaps more important than walking up, is escaping down in emergencies. (Of course since the fire rules still stipulate not using lifts in evacuations it is kind of moot if you live in a 74 floor building etc.)
The other factor in Haussmanian urban design, whether by happy accident or clever design, the height remains human and while still allowing relatively narrow streets (and thus density) it still allows adequate light and air in the street. Even casual visitors to Paris (and imitators in Barcelona, Madrid, Manhattan etc), perhaps unconsciously, acknowledge this fact: Paris has a grace about it despite what one might have imagined could have turned into a repetitive oppressive outcome–but definitely does not. On the other hand we have plenty of evidence around the world that medium-high rise, as in all those project housing in UK, USA, and France, of 15 to 30 floors DOES turn into an oppressive horrorshow. (Luckily much of it was built in post-war shoddiness period and so much of it has reached the premature end of life and is being demolished everywhere.) Funny enough, low rise of 3 to 4 floors often is also shoddy and poor looking, without achieving density. Where modern developments retain this height, they too have a good ambience–eg. the Newstead River Park high-end section (called Pier) right on the Brisbane river, are 7 to 8 floors and are excellent. (And holds the price record for a Briz apartment at $15M. And I would add is superior to any of those super-high-rise either in the Briz CBD or Gold Coast, or for that matter Melbourne Docklands.)
Michael,
I’m not saying you NEED a lift, I mean you MUST have a lift. I agree we could easily go higher without one (my 80+ year old grandmother lived on the 4th floor in Europe without a lift – but eventually she had to move when she couldn’t handle the stairs any more).
You do touch on the problem of how to get cheap to look good and be functional as well. We rarely do that well, and if the cost is $15m it is a bit out of reach of most of us!
And that is the key problem – it is easy to use European examples that are good, but there are lots and lots of very bad ones over there as well. And replicting most of the good ones would cost – and there goes the affordability aspect.
@Krammer56
I really don’t think it is that difficult to achieve quality at reasonable price. In fact using a “Parisian” plan most developments might well turn out to have more saleable sq metres than other plans. The Newstead River Park development is quite large and is upmarket (it’s only 2.5 to 3 km from CBD and on the river) but IMO it would have been a better urban renewable site if made denser/more compact. Instead they are going up while having too much open space and so-called “parkland” but which ends up as deadzone. (That $15 mil was the double level penthouse right on river with its own pool etc plus Pier has an artificial lake on the inward side–to keep the peasants at an adequate distance.)
Ditto, the more extreme and ridiculous Melbourne Docklands–they could have had 6-7 floors of super-lux apartments on the water with more affordable apartments inside that (little view) at the 7-8 floors on relatively narrow streets and of course the whole ground floor being commercial (shops, cafes, restos, wine bars, liberal-arts professional space). Instead they have silly giant wide streets all over the site, plus superwide freeway type roads (they will probably call them boulevards, hah!). The whole site is a sterile deadzone and will barely improve as the site fills in.
Incidentally, lots of the old apartments in Paris now have lifts squeezed into the space between stairs in the most amazing manner. And I would have to admit if I was to buy something in Paris I would strongly tend towards such an arrangement.
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