My main caveats with ongoing sprawl are that they tend to exacerbate problems with existing sprawl.
Like, for instance, you CAN build a nice, walkable, Strong-Towns-compliant exurb on some greenfield outside of existing suburbs. But most of the time, what ends up happening is that the dominant suburban development model decides to plop a stroad full of strip-malls right next to it, and everyone who wants to go enjoy the walkability from outside ends up having to drive there on existing arterials and highways... so all you've accomplished is to make traffic worse AND sprawl worse.
To me, the loss rate on this is just too high. It'd be one thing if more than ~10% of the time**, the nearby suburbs looked at this amazing new exurb and started rehabilitating their own stroads and re-legalizing the sort of "Main Street" style historical development patterns that Strong Towns valorizes. But... they just *don't*. It's too easy for them to keep doing things the way they've done them for the last 80 years. Even in places that are relatively YIMBY, they just don't have the muscle memory to do things better, so the bad money keeps chasing out the good.
** (IE if it were flipped and this was more like 90% of the time)
So, any political strategy based on "Build Greenfield Better" is going to have to take this into account and focus on actually selling urbanism to the suburbs surrounding the green fields we're building on. Otherwise, it's just wasted effort and space -- like trying to grow flowers in a garden already choked over by weeds.
But most of the time, what ends up happening is that the dominant suburban development model decides to plop a stroad full of strip-malls right next to it,
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Not sure where you get this most of the time. What is a suburb you have in mind where this has occurred?
I think it's more that you have small individual pockets of walkable mixed-use fabric but they're very much contained within a larger typical suburban pattern. Strong Towns calls it "drive-to urbanism" - the idea that it's more of an amenity than something large or connected enough to enable an actual lifestyle. The counterpoint is that as more of the legacy properties get redeveloped in a New Urbanist-ish style, you might eventually get a de facto connected urban fabric. I'm not sure, it's a good question and I don't think we quite know yet.
As of now, I don’t think we have nearly enough density of this kind of project to get to a re-connected urban fabric, and I don’t see us on even an exponential trajectory to get there.
The limits of an infill-only approach are really clear if you look at Miami. This is a region that experienced a huge spike in demand a few years ago but has fewer barriers to building infill than other high-demand cities. There is a lot of infill under construction, everything from big new highrises in the Edgewater-Brickell corridor to new duplexes replacing single family homes from the 1940s. Still, housing prices are way up relative to five years ago. Since the region is wedged between the ocean and the Everglades, for the most part everywhere that could be a suburb is already developed as such. The apartment boom may catch up with demand eventually, but it is slow.
You can’t do greenfield as sprawl. You need dense new cities, it’s the only thing that really works economically. It can be done hub and spoke with a bigger city, with the caveat that there can’t be a billion spokes to one hub.
Metropolises need airports and interstate access, but really do not need an interstate through the business district. They could really use robust train access, perhaps a high-speed passenger line to another city that isn’t shared with freight and that runs clockface service all day.
The thing about infill development is that neighbors never want it, cities don’t do comprehensive planning, and developers wind up doing something sprawl-like or building a mall + townhouses instead of something that works. Very high rate of failure with these constraints.
When I think greenfield cities, I think of the time my husband and I were in South Korea and had rented a car for a few hours and were trying to find this Buddhist temple outside of Iksan using a bad atlas that wasn’t even really a road atlas but did have some roads marked. It was an adventure, considering neither of us knew Korean nor international road sign conventions. We kept getting diverted (like several times by accident) into a totally greenfield metropolis, with all these high-rises (all stamped with massive chaebol logos, naturally), industrial parks, a new downtown, train lines, etc all *under construction* as in no one lived there yet. It was really cool (we did eventually find the Buddhist temple after we had given up and headed back to Iksan).
That’s the kind of greenfield construction I want to see. Preferably where they just put a grid of cut and cover driverless metros (or elevated trains) under *every other street at least* before building the city, and ideally making everything handicapped accessible. Then ban cars that aren’t work and delivery trucks and build massive free secure parking garages on the border of the greenfield city so whoever wants a car can park it outside the city for road trips and whatnot.
If you found a pretty place where you want to live, you may not want more accessibility. The rancher who watched the antelope play from his front window now sees urban sprawl because Cheyenne keeps building on new ground. The road that took him to Shari's for coffee with old hands has now brought condo development to his front door. Ranchers would rather hear the coyotes laugh and cry and call to one another at dusk rather than count cars in the traffic parade.
I tend to agree with you, especially in the cases where it's obvious the sprawl is happening because of spillovers from places that won't build anything. I think real dense cities and real countryside or farmland are two sides of the same coin.
My main caveats with ongoing sprawl are that they tend to exacerbate problems with existing sprawl.
Like, for instance, you CAN build a nice, walkable, Strong-Towns-compliant exurb on some greenfield outside of existing suburbs. But most of the time, what ends up happening is that the dominant suburban development model decides to plop a stroad full of strip-malls right next to it, and everyone who wants to go enjoy the walkability from outside ends up having to drive there on existing arterials and highways... so all you've accomplished is to make traffic worse AND sprawl worse.
To me, the loss rate on this is just too high. It'd be one thing if more than ~10% of the time**, the nearby suburbs looked at this amazing new exurb and started rehabilitating their own stroads and re-legalizing the sort of "Main Street" style historical development patterns that Strong Towns valorizes. But... they just *don't*. It's too easy for them to keep doing things the way they've done them for the last 80 years. Even in places that are relatively YIMBY, they just don't have the muscle memory to do things better, so the bad money keeps chasing out the good.
** (IE if it were flipped and this was more like 90% of the time)
So, any political strategy based on "Build Greenfield Better" is going to have to take this into account and focus on actually selling urbanism to the suburbs surrounding the green fields we're building on. Otherwise, it's just wasted effort and space -- like trying to grow flowers in a garden already choked over by weeds.
"
But most of the time, what ends up happening is that the dominant suburban development model decides to plop a stroad full of strip-malls right next to it,
"
Not sure where you get this most of the time. What is a suburb you have in mind where this has occurred?
I think it's more that you have small individual pockets of walkable mixed-use fabric but they're very much contained within a larger typical suburban pattern. Strong Towns calls it "drive-to urbanism" - the idea that it's more of an amenity than something large or connected enough to enable an actual lifestyle. The counterpoint is that as more of the legacy properties get redeveloped in a New Urbanist-ish style, you might eventually get a de facto connected urban fabric. I'm not sure, it's a good question and I don't think we quite know yet.
Correct.
As of now, I don’t think we have nearly enough density of this kind of project to get to a re-connected urban fabric, and I don’t see us on even an exponential trajectory to get there.
Um, this is just the status quo
The limits of an infill-only approach are really clear if you look at Miami. This is a region that experienced a huge spike in demand a few years ago but has fewer barriers to building infill than other high-demand cities. There is a lot of infill under construction, everything from big new highrises in the Edgewater-Brickell corridor to new duplexes replacing single family homes from the 1940s. Still, housing prices are way up relative to five years ago. Since the region is wedged between the ocean and the Everglades, for the most part everywhere that could be a suburb is already developed as such. The apartment boom may catch up with demand eventually, but it is slow.
You can’t do greenfield as sprawl. You need dense new cities, it’s the only thing that really works economically. It can be done hub and spoke with a bigger city, with the caveat that there can’t be a billion spokes to one hub.
Metropolises need airports and interstate access, but really do not need an interstate through the business district. They could really use robust train access, perhaps a high-speed passenger line to another city that isn’t shared with freight and that runs clockface service all day.
The thing about infill development is that neighbors never want it, cities don’t do comprehensive planning, and developers wind up doing something sprawl-like or building a mall + townhouses instead of something that works. Very high rate of failure with these constraints.
When I think greenfield cities, I think of the time my husband and I were in South Korea and had rented a car for a few hours and were trying to find this Buddhist temple outside of Iksan using a bad atlas that wasn’t even really a road atlas but did have some roads marked. It was an adventure, considering neither of us knew Korean nor international road sign conventions. We kept getting diverted (like several times by accident) into a totally greenfield metropolis, with all these high-rises (all stamped with massive chaebol logos, naturally), industrial parks, a new downtown, train lines, etc all *under construction* as in no one lived there yet. It was really cool (we did eventually find the Buddhist temple after we had given up and headed back to Iksan).
That’s the kind of greenfield construction I want to see. Preferably where they just put a grid of cut and cover driverless metros (or elevated trains) under *every other street at least* before building the city, and ideally making everything handicapped accessible. Then ban cars that aren’t work and delivery trucks and build massive free secure parking garages on the border of the greenfield city so whoever wants a car can park it outside the city for road trips and whatnot.
If you found a pretty place where you want to live, you may not want more accessibility. The rancher who watched the antelope play from his front window now sees urban sprawl because Cheyenne keeps building on new ground. The road that took him to Shari's for coffee with old hands has now brought condo development to his front door. Ranchers would rather hear the coyotes laugh and cry and call to one another at dusk rather than count cars in the traffic parade.
I tend to agree with you, especially in the cases where it's obvious the sprawl is happening because of spillovers from places that won't build anything. I think real dense cities and real countryside or farmland are two sides of the same coin.