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Actually, these suburbs can be found outside of many western and southwestern cities. Scottsdale, AZ (very pricey); Pasadena, CA (ditto); lots of town-like burbs around Denver, e.g. Littleton, Louisville, Lafayette, Golden, Arvada, etc.
Scottsdale is pricey, but it's pretty much all sprawl. Pasadena does have history (as does Golden, it appears). The rest of those Denver suburbs you mentioned didn't really explode in population until after WWII, so I have a tough time believing they resemble places like Lower Merion or Mount Lebanon, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not claiming newer cities like the ones you describe don't have upscale communities--they most certainly do. But the selection of streetcar/railroad suburbs of any quality are comparatively limited.
Scottsdale is pricey, but it's pretty much all sprawl. Pasadena does have history (as does Golden, it appears). The rest of those Denver suburbs you mentioned didn't really explode in population until after WWII, so I have a tough time believing they resemble places like Lower Merion or Mount Lebanon, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not claiming newer cities like the ones you describe don't have upscale communities--they most certainly do. But the selection of streetcar/railroad suburbs of any quality are comparatively limited.
The Denver suburbs I mentioned have an older core with a downtown in all those cases, plus newer housing. They don't necessarily look just like Mt. Lebo, but they are very town-like as opposed to "McMansion developments that branch off a main road full of strip malls and chain stores."
You've been arguing for pages and pages that people would select the politically correct high-density development if only the evil long-standing density regulations could be changed in the exurbs.
So you are in fact defending the "statist" position: the state should be able to make it illegal for people to build as they see fit on their land to serve the market as they perceive it, as long as it strikes a blow against people you see as "politically correct" (whatever that is supposed to mean in this context).
Nice contradiction of everything you claim to believe. You're not anti-statist, you are just another Culture Warrior who is fine with the state as long as it is enforcing the culture you prefer.
Pittsburgh, opportunity is knocking, what we do in the coming years will
define us not only as a city , metropolitan area or region it will define us
as a people who either chose to make a difference or who kept the status
quo. Pittsburgh, open your eyes and mind to the possibilities at hand.
Most Denver suburbs are over 90% post war. Yes, they have areas that are designated as "Old Arvada", etc. These were the sections that were once a few buildings on the prairie pre-war. But most of them are post war sprawl. Comparing them to prewar streetcar suburbs like Mt. Lebonan just doesn't really work. Denver suburbs are very large areas of single family home housing on a grid. Even a lot of Denver is post war.
I don't think you can logically divorce the way the game unfolds from the rules it's being played under.
Of course you can--you did yourself. Which is more important in determining the outcome of a pro football game--the rules or the players? Is it 50% rules, 50% players? 60-40?
In truth it is a nonsense question, because those are in fact "logically distinct" ways of determining an outcome, and so in fact you can't "logically" weigh them against each other.
In any event, that is my position. If you want to take another position, that's your right, but don't attribute it to me.
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My problem in the nuance of the word you've chosen lies in the fact that land use policy is not rooted in some universal notion of right and wrong
What is illegal and why it is illegal are two different issues. Again, it is cold comfort to developers who can't do what they want because it is illegal that it isn't illegal because of a universal notion of right and wrong, but rather because of a complex web of financial self-interests and poorly-structured political institutions.
That said--Culture Warriors like some of the posters in this thread (not you) border on treating this as an issue of fundamental morality. After all, "politically correct" is the next thing to "Satanic" for people like that.
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As such, it's a whole lot easier to change, if the political will exists to change it.
"Political will" is a pretty useless phrase in this context (as it often is in general). Almost none of these issues are decided by referendum, and as I have repeatedly noted, often many of the people with a stake in the outcome are not yet voters in the relevant jurisdictions, because the laws in question are in fact locking them out of the jurisdiction.
To really break things open, we would need something like the "political will" to demand that higher levels of government officials override the traditional role of localities in land-use policy, on pain of losing their bids for re-election, AND the same sort of enforceable demand that those higher levels of government officials adopt a laissez faire approach once they took that authority for themselves. And no, there isn't really much interest in demanding such a sweeping change, among other reasons because land-use policy is not something most people currently consider a voting issue (which is too bad--but with a lot of work, who knows, maybe that will change).
I wish I could be more hopeful for the short term, but the fact is that this is a classic "path-dependence" problem, and after decades of heading down this path it won't be a quick process to switch to a different path.
Railroads replaced rivers as the primary mode of transportation; Railroad corridors replaced river valleys as the nexus of development. Highways replaced railroads as the primary mode of transportation; highway corridors replaced railroad corridors as the nexus of development.
This is a bit of an oversimplification. Railroads have remained important transportation assets for both freight and passenger service, and there are plenty of instances in the United States and abroad where rail for commuters has continued to serve as a locus for residential development, to the extent the legal system allows it. The analogy to water transport is definitely not apt--waterways were never the main form of urbanized-area passenger transportation, and for good reasons that remain broadly true today.
I was referring to inter-urban travel, not intra-urban travel. I often think that the anti-sprawl folks forget how important the interstate system is to the American economy. Railroads are still used for bulk materials; so are waterways. But if you need to get parts from the port in Long Beach to a factory in Bangor as quickly and cheaply as possible, you're going to use the interstate system. The interstates are the main reason people in Pittsburgh can eat fresh tomatoes, grapes, and cantaloupe in January and avocados anytime of the year. It allows American Eagle and Best Buy to stock the latest fashions and technologies. Furniture can be designed in New York, manufactured in North Carolina, and arrive in the New York showroom a week later. This gives the American economy a flexibility that Europeans can only dream of (try to ship a product from Athens to Copenhagen in less than 2 weeks). This is also why development (sprawl) is moving towards and along the interstate corridors.
Not so long ago development sprawled along the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, McKees Rocks, Coraopolis, Aliquippa, Monaca, Beaver, Shippingport, East Liverpool, Newell, Chester, Wierton, Wheeling and beyond. Railroads were built along the rivers; development continued to flourish in those areas. The interstates were built relatively far away; as inter-city transportation and the economy drifted from water/rail transportation to highway transportation, development moved to the interstate corridors, and that's why places like Grove City, Portersville, Prospect, Zelienople, Evans City, and Cranberry Township are thriving today. And I doubt that the interstate highway system is any more or less subsidized than the interstate waterway systems were in the early 1800s and the interstate railroads were in the early 1900s.
And I doubt that the interstate highway system is any more or less subsidized than the interstate waterway systems were in the early 1800s and the interstate railroads were in the early 1900s.
"Interstate waterway" systems were never subsidized directly until the emergence of the U S Army Corps of Engineers -- long after the railroads had displaced canals as the prime mover of heavy, high-volume low-valued freight.
What happened was this: In 1816, Congressional leaders from all sections of the country agreed on a general appropriations bill for what were termed "internal improvements" -- canals, plank roads, graveled turnpikes, etc; the first railroads were still ten years in the future. President James Madison vetoed the bill before leaving office.
That decision turned the matter back to the states, and only New York State was favored enough by geography to construct the Erie Canal both entirely within its borders and with a minimum of mountain obstacles to surmount.
The canal turned into a huge moneymaker withn weeks of its completion, simply brcause much-cheaper water transportation now extended all the way from New York to any point on the Great Lakes. It also ensured that New York, rather than Philadelphia, Baltimore or Hampton Roads, would become America's pre-eminent commercial city. Pennsylvania and Virginia eventually tried to follow suit, but the barrier of the Alleghenies made those efforts fruitless, and paved the way for the Panic of 1837.
In the end, the laws of the marketplace always win out; politicians and their well-intentioned clientele can trifle with them at their own risk.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 09-18-2012 at 12:48 AM..
I was referring to inter-urban travel, not intra-urban travel. I often think that the anti-sprawl folks forget how important the interstate system is to the American economy.
I'm in complete agreement with you on this point. I don't have a problem with highways in general, and recognize they are a very important component of our transportation system, particularly insofar as they serve transportation needs between cities.
Generally, I sincerely reject the regrettably common attitude that some forms of transportation technology are inherently good and some bad (or some more "American" than others, and other variations on this theme). All the various contemporary transportation technologies have valid uses, and all of them can also be misused. I think highways have been misused insofar as they were the main way we invested in transportation infrastructure for urban commuters for several decades, but that definitely doesn't mean I think all investments in highways in that period were ill-conceived--many highway projects were in fact good ideas and well worth doing.
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This is also why development (sprawl) is moving towards and along the interstate corridors.
Here I disagree with you a bit. Highways that primarily do what highways do well--serve intercity traffic-- will in fact attract certain sorts of development. But such highways are not much of a magnet for other sorts of development, including most of the residential development associated with "sprawl".
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Not so long ago development sprawled along the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, McKees Rocks, Coraopolis, Aliquippa, Monaca, Beaver, Shippingport, East Liverpool, Newell, Chester, Wierton, Wheeling and beyond. Railroads were built along the rivers; development continued to flourish in those areas.
I think this is again an oversimplification. What really drove development along the rivers was the mills. The rivers were in fact relevant to where the mills were located in part for transportation reasons: they provided water/barge access, and also could be used as rail corridors. But the rivers are also where a lot of relatively flat land was available, suitable for very large industrial operations.
And as we have discussed many times around here, once there were alternatives to having to live near the mills to work in them, including when we were still in the rail-dominated (aka streetcar-dominated, aka non-automobile-dominated) era, people started moving away from the mill towns. So that is actually a good example of how different forms of development--in this case heavy industry and residential--can end up following different patterns even given a common set of available transportation technologies.
Add all this together, and you can imagine a scenario in which the truly intercity highways were built, but not the spurs and inner-rings and such into the core urban areas designed for use by daily commuters, with the public money that was spent on those urban commuter highways instead being spent on more rational technologies for commuting purposes (many variations on trains, perhaps more busways, a more extensive network of boulevards, now maybe urban gondolas, and so forth), oriented among other things toward encouraging reinvestment in existing residential communities and brownfields within the existing development footprint.
In such a scenario, there would still be new development along the intercity highways directly related to using those highways for intercity purposes, which would likely mostly be industrial/commercial but probably a bit of other uses too, including some residential. However, most of the new residential in this era would have been on a different, less sprawly, pattern, as commuters, and employers dependent on commuters, clustered near this alternative commuting network.
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