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I'm becoming more and more curious-how much longer can urban sprawl continue before it can stretch out no further? As suburbs are built further and further out, commutes will get longer and longer. The distance that this continuous urban land can spread increases as more and more jobs spread further out, and as highways are upgraded, but how much further can it go before it reaches critical mass? Eventually sprawl will have to reach a point where parts of the metro are so far from one another that they can no longer be considered suburbs or even exurbs. So how will urban sprawl play out once this "critical mass" is reached?
As long as cities exist people will be interested in living elsewhere.
Interesting. It seems like the SF Bay Area already has reached "critical mass," as it didn't really expand much.
The borders of the Bay Area are Big Ag farm land. So there isn't enough money in the universe for those guys to sell out for housing and development. The Bay Area has well reached "critical mass" in terms of commute time from the edges of the region to any one of the major or minor job centers.
The trends will reverse as demographic changes will leave vacant suburban homes. Gen Y doesn't want to commute 90 minutes each way to work.
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Originally Posted by drive carephilly
Those sorts of decisions don't happen in a vacuum, though.
I've had a few jobs where I would've loved to live in the neighborhood and be able to walk to work in 10 minutes or less but I couldn't afford it.
Silicon Valley is so expensive and packed with traffic because cities like Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View and Menlo Park (Home to Facebook, Google and Apple) only allowed offices and no housing so now they have 2-3 times more jobs than residences!
Metro areas will just blend into each other with pockets of employment all along the way. See the Washington to Boston corridor.
That's an exaggeration, but as people move out, jobs will move out, enabling development further from the old core.
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Originally Posted by nei
Or in the offshoot of the Northeast Corridor I live in. Once there was New Haven, Hartford and Springfield, plus scattered towns in between. Now it's just one long (80 mile) corridor with jobs and residents interspersed. The old towns and cities have more of a concentration but everything's blended together without much of a clear edge. Southward, New Haven to New York City is similar corridor but much more intensely developed.
Another example of one of those corridors which I have seen created over the years with my own eyes since I was a teenager is the Los Angeles to San Diego corridor. Now I admit it is not completely continuous because the huge Camp Pendleton Marine Base sits in between. But it is more or less a built up corridor at this point.
Another consideration is that some areas do not have the additional population growth to support the continued outbuilding and lower density that comes along with it. My area, Northeast Ohio (Cleveland, Akron) is definitely on the low growth end of the spectrum but still has the same sprawl issues as everywhere else. An observation has been made that at some point the system will break (for example, roads) because the tax base will not be able to support the continued addition of road-miles to the system.
I suspect this is a similar issue for all but the highest growth areas, as lower density development leaves less dollars per each mile of infrastructure. In my area it is already visible in some areas where there is not enough money to maintain roads at a level most would consider acceptable.
There are other concerns at play like one of the original causes of sprawl, which is fleeing urban crime. Unfortunately it seems that the crime always catches up and our society is just leaving decimated neighborhoods in its wake. Short of a major, major push for gentrification and reinvestment (which we are starting to see some of), eventually there will come a point where it is unfeasible to continue to run outward from urban ills.
They can live where they want. In case you haven't noticed, many cities are thriving again. It's not because of baby boomers moving back downtown.
Well, in some cases they are. Empty-nesters sometimes do contribute to today's urban renaissance. They like to be close to all the amenities that cities can offer, and can feasibly do it because their kids are gone. I'd say that this "reurbanization" trend is not so much generational as it is just an evolution in taste.
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Originally Posted by IC_deLight
As long as cities exist people will be interested in living elsewhere.
As long as cities exist people will be interested in living elsewhere.
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Originally Posted by OuttaTheLouBurbs
That's quite a paradox you've got there.
I see no paradox. I see a misuse of the word "people", which should have been qualified. IC_deLight's meaning is actually pretty clear. He means "some people" or "quite a few people". I would word his thought (as I understand it) this way:
"As long as cities exist there will be people who will be interested in living elsewhere."
IC_deLight may be attempting to counter the same error that some others make when they talk about the urban renaissance and imply that "people" only live in the suburbs because they are stuck there or some such nonsense.
There is a lot of subtle (and also occasionally some not-so-subtle) sneering in the Urban Planning Forum.
You're right. There will always be people who want to live in the suburbs. I had taken it as "as long as cities exist, no one will want to live there." I had interpreted "people" as "everyone" instead of some people. My mistake
I live in Phoenix and urban sprawl is taken to a whole new level out here. It has taken millions of years for the delicate desert ecosystem to evolve and greedy developers selfishly destroy it all when they build yet another housing complex on the outskirts of the metro area. Phoenix has already swallowed up the towns of Sun-City and Surprise and is still growing as more and more Americans are choosing to migrate to the Sun Belt.
The city of Phoenix arguably shouldn't even exist. The residents live in artificial environments of air-conditioned rooms and manicured lawns irrigated by water pumped from the Colorado River. It's not natural to have green golf courses in this region. Public transport is poor due to the low-density of the city and commutes are getting longer. It can take up to two hours to travel from Surprise in the NW of the metro area to Chandler in the SE.
I've been advocating high-density apartment living in the downtown core for a long time now but everybody wants to own their own bungalow with a back garden in the suburbs. We need to build up and preserve the beautiful Arizona desert environment before it's too late.
I live in Phoenix and urban sprawl is taken to a whole new level out here. It has taken millions of years for the delicate desert ecosystem to evolve and greedy developers selfishly destroy it all when they build yet another housing complex on the outskirts of the metro area. Phoenix has already swallowed up the towns of Sun-City and Surprise and is still growing as more and more Americans are choosing to migrate to the Sun Belt.
The city of Phoenix arguably shouldn't even exist. The residents live in artificial environments of air-conditioned rooms and manicured lawns irrigated by water pumped from the Colorado River. It's not natural to have green golf courses in this region. Public transport is poor due to the low-density of the city and commutes are getting longer. It can take up to two hours to travel from Surprise in the NW of the metro area to Chandler in the SE.
I've been advocating high-density apartment living in the downtown core for a long time now but everybody wants to own their own bungalow with a back garden in the suburbs. We need to build up and preserve the beautiful Arizona desert environment before it's too late.
Nor is it any more natural to sit there typing away on a computer, and yet there you sit. There's absolutely nothing natural about a computer. It's a highly unnatural process of converting raw resources into something entirely different that is far more complicated than moving water. As a species, we've been moving water for many centuries. Computers are a much, much more recent innovation than the rather basic idea of moving water to where people live.
Environmental concerns I can agree with is at least a consideration. This notion of "natural," however, is completely bogus.
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Another example
