I agree that education funding, which is mostly based on property taxes, needs to change but the property taxes levied by individual communities enables those communities some autonomy. It is difficult to convince people to give up that local control since state and federal money will come with restrictions. For example one community might have a high regard for music and foreign languages but if math and science are the order of the day for state or national educational policy then that community has to decide to give up those programs or levy taxes. The local control is difficult to let go. Maybe one solution is to divide the education up into different departments and fund each department separately.
The image of the culture of suburbia that I paint is one that exists but is not applicable to every one. More and more culture is becoming separated from environment. I just wonder how a poor suburban culture can be avoided or if it should be avoided.
One thing that has been brought to my attention as another problem to be solved or made worse with planning is road maintenance or specifically snow clearing. Apparently it takes so many houses to provide adequate tax revenue to support snow removal services. Let’s say, hypothetically, 1000 houses per sow plow. If one Snow plow can plow 5 miles of street in one 8 hr period then it would become a problem if those houses were spread out over more than 5 miles which may be the case with large lots. Solution is to levy more taxes so 700 homes support one plow or forego plowing side streets. This may be one reason some people decide to opt for the SUV instead of the Hybrid. This condition exist in urban centers too, as the property taxes are high but due to TIFFs and blight, the stable residential areas have to bear a greater burden of the tax revenue to support snow removal for the entire city.
The lack of density makes mass transit and paratransit more difficult. If the low density areas were developed in conjunction with nodes of transit oriented development say 5-10 miles in any direction from a single family zone we could reduce personal automobile use. Just carve out a few blocks of parking garage and essential retail around a train station or bus stop. Car use in the suburbs can be reduced through smart development and I dare say a concentrated marketing/ propaganda campaign. Just look at the decline in ownership of Hummers, so many Hummer owners in the city are giving up their Suburban Assault vehicles because of the sneers and distain people give them and the real fear that vigilantes will take a swipe at them. A concentrated effort to steer transit consumers towards mass transit and or paratransit could work. Imagine if after 9/11 W decided to convince people that it would be “patriotic” to car pool and use mass transit.
Marketing is a very powerful force in our profession, and we should all be aware of its potential to do good as well as harm.
"Our studio was fortunate to have a guest lecture by the editor of Canadian Architect magazine back in October. He presented a side of Toronto (often called the most multicultural city in the world) that we don't often hear:
1) The suburbs are much more ethnically diverse than the city centre, and
2) suburban density is typically understated, as several generations of an (immigrant) family often life in the same suburban home.
"
I agree - Come to the northwest and southwest suburbs of Chicago and it's amazingly diverse eastern european, latin American / Indian and Paki - the groups that used to immigrate to the city are instead going straight to the burbs. Its odd to go to Rolling Meadows and see a strip mall full of Polish Delis and Indian Restaraunts and sari stores, with a spanish clay tile roof and an Olive gardedn in the outlot. Its the LA-ing of America
you are just scratching the surface of this issue. Our entire infrastructure benefits from atleast moderate density. Over taxing of the resources can be an issue in super dense areas, but in general having more people in an area greatly reduces the per user costs for roads, sewage, storm water and potable water deliver systems, electrical cable, telephone lines, internet lines, etc. etc. etc. The cost to construct, and maintain roads and drainage systems in particular can be very expensive when you are running miles to service only a few individuals.
It is very interesting that, when we discuss roads, these are considered obvious public services that should be fully funded by tax payers, but when the issue is rail, these are primarily viewed as private investments. In this way, the US government has long been heavily subsidizing the automobile industry. I am not anti road, but it is a point, what if the car companies had to pay, atleast some of the costs, to construct the roads for their cars? If they in turn passed this cost onto consumers, trains and mass transit might look a lot more appealing and economical.
I can answer that - the economic multiplier is much higher from subsidized road construction in the form of construction spending, business development and home building. Its the subsidation of exspansion. The flip side is go to the decaying inner south side suburbs of Chicago and look at what happens when taxes dry up and they can no longer subsidize the roads. or Detroit for that matter. Pot holes 24" deep, thousands in a given block. Roads are unusable in spots with no money to fix them.
Detroit is a very low density city. Most of the residential stock is single family and duplex detached homes. This is the historic development not the current redevelopment that is trying to push up the density. Detroit is home to the first inner city farms in America. The South Side of Chicago has another problem, the city owns most of the vacant land through condemnation due to back taxes. As with Chicago or any major city dealing with the city is so difficult that developers rather take a pass on discounted prices for acres of empty lots and pay a premium for prime farmland on the outskirts.
The holes in Chicago streets are every where, follow the speed limits on LSD and have a spare tire.
On the subject of Detroit I still hope GM goes under for their role in the National City Lines Conspiracy where Gm and other automobile related industries bought out and destroyed almost all of the streetcars in America. Many cities big and small had streetcars. Corporate karma should cause GM to go under for this.
The road salting chemicals eat the asphalt binders, to reduce plowing they dump even more salt melt thereby eating more asphalt thus creating more exspensive problems later. Additionaly we use cheap asphalt in America, lower initial cost. They have better binder chemistry in Europe and Wisconsin but it costs more. It all goes back to taxes and government.
i wonder a bit about the usefulness of rail in modern society. nobody lives in that linear way anymore - if not carefully done then could become just another wasteful investment in 19th century lifestyle that anyone with a car will ignore as irrelevant.
here in tokyo it is ok, but you know to go to visit my studio i need to go to the center first first then head back outwards (in a V-shaped trip), adding about 20 minutes to the trip at the least. going to my office is cool because it is a straight run on a single train line (although its is 40 minutes away), and the line also runs close to my university so i am pretty well covered. but my wife is required to go to central transit hub then head back out in another V shaped path that is a little hard to bear sometimes. if we had a car she could commute faster.
and yet tokyo is by far the most convenient rail system i have ever used. beats the hell out of new york or london, and it is always improving because companies add redundant lines that shortcut through city, etc. All it needs to make such a thing feasible is a population of 33 million. ;-)
the point is that most people live their lives in a decentralised manner, if not as individuals then certainly as families. the car is flexible and roads are relatively cheap, so really there is a certain logic to their existence, especially in our current culture.
maintenance and the other issues above are difficult ones, and very real. but will they be resolved by rail? is that another example of a solution looking for a problem?
I think you are describing the flaws with the hub and spoke model, which can be resolved with additional lines, but yes you are right, in general the mass transit system favors general movement over specific movement. If you take a common path that a lot of people take, you'll find a bus or train route, if not, you might need to work the system a little harder to get where you are going.
I'm not really convinced roads are relatively cheap, the costs for design, construction, and maintenance and replacement are substantial, and the cost of individual cars is tremendous. I think a well designed transit system will be more efficient, and ridership, as you identified, is key. Hong Kong has a strong system that mixes large scale subway trains, Buses and micro buses to service people moving across the city or within small neighborhoods.
I believe the maintenance costs of rail systems are substantially less than the comprehensive costs of cars, roads, traffic lights, etc. Not to mention undisclosed costs, such as environmental impact and pollution.
I wonder how we can start restoring the farmland that has been destroyed by suburban development. Start your bulldozers.---how about restoring the forests that have been destroyed by farmland.
One follows the other. Stop destroying farmland and the pressure to destroy forest land is reduced, but not eliminated. Maybe using the huge quantities of organic solid waist to enrich the soils might be one way to go about this, imagine a new brown bin on the curb for leaves, kitchen scraps etcetera.
Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years.
I might agree with the first sentence, but the second one...huh? People buying houses retards development in medical technology, sofware and energy? Is this pure opinion on his part, is there any data to back this up? Don't sound right to me.
I haven’t read all the books and articles he cites, but I do find the concept of Density and the speed or velocity of ideas to be an interesting observation/ theory. I am a believer of Jane Jacobs’s ideas and theories because they are based on simple observations. “If a city bets boring even the rich move out” for example.
I am not sure I buy it but it did peak my interest after both sides duked it out on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 today. The lack of data was the largest hole poked into this theory.
I mean I guess Jump has summed everything up pretty accurately. I would like to point out that one problem with understanding the difference between suburbs, metro areas and cities is that the history on it is muddled.
The UN said that before the 18th century... only about 7% of the world's population lived in "urban environments." Do they base this figure off of density, size of city, development density, land use patterns?
I only bring this up because say you could have a settlement that falls under the definition of urban living 10000 people (how big is the settlement). Where as, a large farming estate may have 100 people. The feudal farming system typically had mass concentrations of people very sparsely dotted but those individuals would retreat to the same estate. So, technically, the population density of a feudal farming development maybe as high as a 100 people per acre where as those who were city dwellers could be living in areas with densities less than 50 people per acre.
Which one is more urban? The farm.
So, there's definitely some historical and cultural methodology to be studied.
And about Gen X and Gen Y's tastes and preferences? Definitely urban. The reason people are choosing the suburbs is because there is no other choice in large expanses of the United States. People say America is about having freedom of choice and freedom in general... but if you basically outlaw a choice, there's not much freedom there anymore eh?
Most of us youngins don't buy this buying a house bullshit either. If you ran the numbers and can't afford an actual "estate home," renting is several hundred thousand dollars cheaper in the long run. This is if you figure in maintenance, appliances, yard maintenance, vehicles, insurance, property taxes and more. I'd rather come out in the end with cash than equity in a home. You can disagree all you want but all you got to do is pop open Excel and see for yourself.
I was responding more to the Atlantic article that PNJ linked to. The writer's points aren't all that new and have been discussed on several threads here at Archinect. But then he has to put the bulk of the blame on owning homes as opposed to renting, since there always has to be one big target in any of these types of articles.
The trouble is not buying a home, it's buying the wrong home for you. Yes, there's advantages to renting, but the big disadvantage is that a very important thing in your life, where you live, is ruled by someone else: the landlord. I've rented a few places, and have had the misfortune of renting a place myself: thanks, but no thanks, I think I'll own the place where I live from now on.
I think you've misunderstood the Atlantic article authors point. He is simply making the case that if we put our money into subsidizing peoples homes and lifestyles, ie. by giving them tax breaks, we are giving away our money, and as a result we have less to spend on other programs, which may or may not include those items he specifically mentioned. It is just a fiscal point, not a philosophical one, you know what I mean?
"what will save the suburbs"...nytimes
I agree that education funding, which is mostly based on property taxes, needs to change but the property taxes levied by individual communities enables those communities some autonomy. It is difficult to convince people to give up that local control since state and federal money will come with restrictions. For example one community might have a high regard for music and foreign languages but if math and science are the order of the day for state or national educational policy then that community has to decide to give up those programs or levy taxes. The local control is difficult to let go. Maybe one solution is to divide the education up into different departments and fund each department separately.
The image of the culture of suburbia that I paint is one that exists but is not applicable to every one. More and more culture is becoming separated from environment. I just wonder how a poor suburban culture can be avoided or if it should be avoided.
One thing that has been brought to my attention as another problem to be solved or made worse with planning is road maintenance or specifically snow clearing. Apparently it takes so many houses to provide adequate tax revenue to support snow removal services. Let’s say, hypothetically, 1000 houses per sow plow. If one Snow plow can plow 5 miles of street in one 8 hr period then it would become a problem if those houses were spread out over more than 5 miles which may be the case with large lots. Solution is to levy more taxes so 700 homes support one plow or forego plowing side streets. This may be one reason some people decide to opt for the SUV instead of the Hybrid. This condition exist in urban centers too, as the property taxes are high but due to TIFFs and blight, the stable residential areas have to bear a greater burden of the tax revenue to support snow removal for the entire city.
The lack of density makes mass transit and paratransit more difficult. If the low density areas were developed in conjunction with nodes of transit oriented development say 5-10 miles in any direction from a single family zone we could reduce personal automobile use. Just carve out a few blocks of parking garage and essential retail around a train station or bus stop. Car use in the suburbs can be reduced through smart development and I dare say a concentrated marketing/ propaganda campaign. Just look at the decline in ownership of Hummers, so many Hummer owners in the city are giving up their Suburban Assault vehicles because of the sneers and distain people give them and the real fear that vigilantes will take a swipe at them. A concentrated effort to steer transit consumers towards mass transit and or paratransit could work. Imagine if after 9/11 W decided to convince people that it would be “patriotic” to car pool and use mass transit.
Marketing is a very powerful force in our profession, and we should all be aware of its potential to do good as well as harm.
"Our studio was fortunate to have a guest lecture by the editor of Canadian Architect magazine back in October. He presented a side of Toronto (often called the most multicultural city in the world) that we don't often hear:
1) The suburbs are much more ethnically diverse than the city centre, and
2) suburban density is typically understated, as several generations of an (immigrant) family often life in the same suburban home.
"
I agree - Come to the northwest and southwest suburbs of Chicago and it's amazingly diverse eastern european, latin American / Indian and Paki - the groups that used to immigrate to the city are instead going straight to the burbs. Its odd to go to Rolling Meadows and see a strip mall full of Polish Delis and Indian Restaraunts and sari stores, with a spanish clay tile roof and an Olive gardedn in the outlot. Its the LA-ing of America
PJN26,
you are just scratching the surface of this issue. Our entire infrastructure benefits from atleast moderate density. Over taxing of the resources can be an issue in super dense areas, but in general having more people in an area greatly reduces the per user costs for roads, sewage, storm water and potable water deliver systems, electrical cable, telephone lines, internet lines, etc. etc. etc. The cost to construct, and maintain roads and drainage systems in particular can be very expensive when you are running miles to service only a few individuals.
It is very interesting that, when we discuss roads, these are considered obvious public services that should be fully funded by tax payers, but when the issue is rail, these are primarily viewed as private investments. In this way, the US government has long been heavily subsidizing the automobile industry. I am not anti road, but it is a point, what if the car companies had to pay, atleast some of the costs, to construct the roads for their cars? If they in turn passed this cost onto consumers, trains and mass transit might look a lot more appealing and economical.
I can answer that - the economic multiplier is much higher from subsidized road construction in the form of construction spending, business development and home building. Its the subsidation of exspansion. The flip side is go to the decaying inner south side suburbs of Chicago and look at what happens when taxes dry up and they can no longer subsidize the roads. or Detroit for that matter. Pot holes 24" deep, thousands in a given block. Roads are unusable in spots with no money to fix them.
ep lemme know where those holes are i'm driving to chicago next weekend.
at the moment, the hole city is one big hole - HA AH
Maybe the Chinectors should toast Retro, a celeb roast perhaps!
Detroit is a very low density city. Most of the residential stock is single family and duplex detached homes. This is the historic development not the current redevelopment that is trying to push up the density. Detroit is home to the first inner city farms in America. The South Side of Chicago has another problem, the city owns most of the vacant land through condemnation due to back taxes. As with Chicago or any major city dealing with the city is so difficult that developers rather take a pass on discounted prices for acres of empty lots and pay a premium for prime farmland on the outskirts.
The holes in Chicago streets are every where, follow the speed limits on LSD and have a spare tire.
On the subject of Detroit I still hope GM goes under for their role in the National City Lines Conspiracy where Gm and other automobile related industries bought out and destroyed almost all of the streetcars in America. Many cities big and small had streetcars. Corporate karma should cause GM to go under for this.
GM makes the hummer?
This gets back to road subsidies and taxes PJN26:
The road salting chemicals eat the asphalt binders, to reduce plowing they dump even more salt melt thereby eating more asphalt thus creating more exspensive problems later. Additionaly we use cheap asphalt in America, lower initial cost. They have better binder chemistry in Europe and Wisconsin but it costs more. It all goes back to taxes and government.
understood, synergy.
i wonder a bit about the usefulness of rail in modern society. nobody lives in that linear way anymore - if not carefully done then could become just another wasteful investment in 19th century lifestyle that anyone with a car will ignore as irrelevant.
here in tokyo it is ok, but you know to go to visit my studio i need to go to the center first first then head back outwards (in a V-shaped trip), adding about 20 minutes to the trip at the least. going to my office is cool because it is a straight run on a single train line (although its is 40 minutes away), and the line also runs close to my university so i am pretty well covered. but my wife is required to go to central transit hub then head back out in another V shaped path that is a little hard to bear sometimes. if we had a car she could commute faster.
and yet tokyo is by far the most convenient rail system i have ever used. beats the hell out of new york or london, and it is always improving because companies add redundant lines that shortcut through city, etc. All it needs to make such a thing feasible is a population of 33 million. ;-)
the point is that most people live their lives in a decentralised manner, if not as individuals then certainly as families. the car is flexible and roads are relatively cheap, so really there is a certain logic to their existence, especially in our current culture.
maintenance and the other issues above are difficult ones, and very real. but will they be resolved by rail? is that another example of a solution looking for a problem?
Jump,
I think you are describing the flaws with the hub and spoke model, which can be resolved with additional lines, but yes you are right, in general the mass transit system favors general movement over specific movement. If you take a common path that a lot of people take, you'll find a bus or train route, if not, you might need to work the system a little harder to get where you are going.
I'm not really convinced roads are relatively cheap, the costs for design, construction, and maintenance and replacement are substantial, and the cost of individual cars is tremendous. I think a well designed transit system will be more efficient, and ridership, as you identified, is key. Hong Kong has a strong system that mixes large scale subway trains, Buses and micro buses to service people moving across the city or within small neighborhoods.
I believe the maintenance costs of rail systems are substantially less than the comprehensive costs of cars, roads, traffic lights, etc. Not to mention undisclosed costs, such as environmental impact and pollution.
NYTimes -part 2
let the discussion resume...
I wonder how we can start restoring the farmland that has been destroyed by suburban development. Start your bulldozers.
rebuilding the soil will take 1000s of years. once compacted and scraped for development, you can't go back.
I wonder how we can start restoring the farmland that has been destroyed by suburban development. Start your bulldozers.---how about restoring the forests that have been destroyed by farmland.
One follows the other. Stop destroying farmland and the pressure to destroy forest land is reduced, but not eliminated. Maybe using the huge quantities of organic solid waist to enrich the soils might be one way to go about this, imagine a new brown bin on the curb for leaves, kitchen scraps etcetera.
vado- farms are being replaced by forests faster then we can cut them down... NYTimes
indianastan was all forest before it was farmland. the point being that before the land was farmland, it acted as something else.
interesting argument in this article
enjoy
I might agree with the first sentence, but the second one...huh? People buying houses retards development in medical technology, sofware and energy? Is this pure opinion on his part, is there any data to back this up? Don't sound right to me.
I haven’t read all the books and articles he cites, but I do find the concept of Density and the speed or velocity of ideas to be an interesting observation/ theory. I am a believer of Jane Jacobs’s ideas and theories because they are based on simple observations. “If a city bets boring even the rich move out” for example.
I am not sure I buy it but it did peak my interest after both sides duked it out on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 today. The lack of data was the largest hole poked into this theory.
I mean I guess Jump has summed everything up pretty accurately. I would like to point out that one problem with understanding the difference between suburbs, metro areas and cities is that the history on it is muddled.
The UN said that before the 18th century... only about 7% of the world's population lived in "urban environments." Do they base this figure off of density, size of city, development density, land use patterns?
I only bring this up because say you could have a settlement that falls under the definition of urban living 10000 people (how big is the settlement). Where as, a large farming estate may have 100 people. The feudal farming system typically had mass concentrations of people very sparsely dotted but those individuals would retreat to the same estate. So, technically, the population density of a feudal farming development maybe as high as a 100 people per acre where as those who were city dwellers could be living in areas with densities less than 50 people per acre.
Which one is more urban? The farm.
So, there's definitely some historical and cultural methodology to be studied.
And about Gen X and Gen Y's tastes and preferences? Definitely urban. The reason people are choosing the suburbs is because there is no other choice in large expanses of the United States. People say America is about having freedom of choice and freedom in general... but if you basically outlaw a choice, there's not much freedom there anymore eh?
Most of us youngins don't buy this buying a house bullshit either. If you ran the numbers and can't afford an actual "estate home," renting is several hundred thousand dollars cheaper in the long run. This is if you figure in maintenance, appliances, yard maintenance, vehicles, insurance, property taxes and more. I'd rather come out in the end with cash than equity in a home. You can disagree all you want but all you got to do is pop open Excel and see for yourself.
I was responding more to the Atlantic article that PNJ linked to. The writer's points aren't all that new and have been discussed on several threads here at Archinect. But then he has to put the bulk of the blame on owning homes as opposed to renting, since there always has to be one big target in any of these types of articles.
The trouble is not buying a home, it's buying the wrong home for you. Yes, there's advantages to renting, but the big disadvantage is that a very important thing in your life, where you live, is ruled by someone else: the landlord. I've rented a few places, and have had the misfortune of renting a place myself: thanks, but no thanks, I think I'll own the place where I live from now on.
kunstler=sick rantelli
i am glad he reintroduced abortion into syntax, tho
Emilio,
I think you've misunderstood the Atlantic article authors point. He is simply making the case that if we put our money into subsidizing peoples homes and lifestyles, ie. by giving them tax breaks, we are giving away our money, and as a result we have less to spend on other programs, which may or may not include those items he specifically mentioned. It is just a fiscal point, not a philosophical one, you know what I mean?
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