If We're Going To Build, Build Well?
Some high level thoughts on "new cities"
As I briefly noted in yesterday’s piece, I was in Los Angeles for a small conference on the question of YIMBYism, new housing, and greenfield development/master-planned communities. Greenfield is the term for developing unbuilt land, in contrast to infill or densification, where we’re either adding new stuff within a built-up area or redeveloping existing sites/structures (i.e. that could cover demolition and rebuilding, expansion, or redeveloping a vacant lot, in an existing urban area.)
The central question was whether or not we should focus on “new cities,” or more exclusively on trying to build stuff and reform land-use regulations in existing cities and suburbs.
Now, you might not be surprised that I found the definitional question here at least as interesting as any of the policy and real-estate considerations. Because you can’t argue the fine points of a question like this without knowing exactly what’s being discussed. What is a “new city”? An incorporated entity (i.e. a legal definition)? A population center? A population center with jobs? Walkability? In what sense are all of the various de facto new suburban communities not “new cities”? Etc., etc. So my big definitional question is this: What distinction is being made or intended to be made between “We should build new cities” and “We should do greenfield development better”?
I suspect that “new cities” sounds more engaging and interesting to the average person, while “we should do greenfield development better” sounds boring. On the other hand, some people react “Why the heck do we need new cities, we already have a lot!” even though they know “new” suburbs are being built all the time. So I’m not sure which rhetorical route is more likely to yield support.
There’s also the question of ownership and control. Reston, Virginia, where I used to live, was a “new city” in the 1960s. To this day it’s governed by a private non-profit company—kind of like a giant HOA—and it’s unincorporated, so it doesn’t have its own government. I take it that this idea of a private city somehow matters more when you’re actually copying the complexity of a city, as opposed to just building a housing development. I wonder if people living in a place that feels like a city would want a mayor and a council?
But back to the higher-level question. One of the attendees expressed the idea that even though greenfield development is obviously happening, even in California, the politics of coalition maintenance would make it difficult for the big YIMBY groups to lean in too much on the “let’s do greenfield development well” message. That’s because there is some YIMBY-environmentalist overlap. So you emphasize the positions that are agreeable to everyone and that won’t split your coalition. (This is what I think of as being one of the points of my newsletter—I write as myself, and I don’t have a coalition to maintain, so I can write things that other folks might agree with but are in a position that makes it difficult for them to say.)
There’s something really interesting about the “greenfield development is happening all the time but we can’t talk about it” phenomenon. It reminds me of the Catholic skepticism of harm reduction. The idea, as I understand it, is that harm reduction starts with the frank acknowledgement that people are doing a (typically harmful or “bad”) thing, and instead of futilely trying to ban it or change their behavior, you find a way for it to go on while inflicting the least harm.
The moral issue some people have with this is that it is different to simply observe that a thing is happening, and affirmatively endorsing it or accepting it. In other words, there is some moral value in not making peace with a bad thing, even if that means that bad thing will have more severe consequences. That the benefits you gain in doing the bad thing better are tainted by having accepted that thing as inevitable.
Obviously, this depends on whether or not you do find a thing objectionable. Harm reduction is typically discussed in the context of things like drug use, prostitution, and homelessness—things a lot of people do not want to accommodate or make peace with. Environmentalists typically feel this way about greenfield development, but I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with it (as long as it isn’t the default or only mode of development.)
A couple of presenters made the point that almost every city in the world grows both vertically (infill/densification) and horizontally (greenfield/expansion). In their telling, there is no growing city that has ever used extra density alone to accommodate all of its growth. The implication being that even if the YIMBYs succeeded in getting California’s big cities to build, there would still be some need for new development.
We were asked to think about any big questions. My question is for you: what do you think of trying to reverse-engineer “real” cities with new, master-planned developments? What do you think of trying to get design and land use better in new-build communities? It sure seems to me like there’s enough developed land in the D.C. suburbs and exurbs that you wouldn’t need to keep developing more land, but maybe that’s just how it works. And maybe the chance of getting it right in a new community could serve as an example to other existing communities in the region.
Tell me what you think!
Related Reading:
When Small Towns Wanted Tall Buildings
A Little More on Rockville Pike
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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.
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.