Living On The Edge
Does density belong in the exurbs?
My latest piece over at Resident Urbanist is about “cluster zoning”—a land-use strategy to reduce environmental impact by clustering homes close together and leaving more unbuilt green space, either, or both, in the development itself and in the general countryside.
Now in an urban context this would be pretty much uncontroversial; it’s just density. But cluster zoning is typically discussed and applied in a semi-rural/exurban context. Whether or not a locality uses that name, it basically looks like this:
As opposed to this:
Cluster zoning is sort of an environmentalist idea which, I think, predates the mainstreaming of urbanism and housing issues. It makes the legitimate point that seeing green space doesn’t mean a place is environmentally friendly; paving over less overall land and using infrastructure more efficiently is environmentally friendly.
There’s a popular image you’ll see on social media making this point (it was actually first made by a member of the YIMBYs of Northern Virginia group!):
So all that checks out conceptually for me. But…not quite. A lot of housing and land-use folks instinctively dislike exurban density like this. It feels intuitively like the worst of both worlds: the raw crowdedness of a more urban place, without the street life or commerce or amenities of a city. The distance and compulsory driving of suburbia, without the privacy and quiet and open space.
That’s certainly how I’ve always looked at these cluster developments. I always took them to be awful planning and developers being cheap more than an example of an actual planning strategy. I’ve even heard of cluster zoning before, and if you asked me about it, I’d say, yeah, of course, that makes sense. But I never recognized this as that.
I have two things to say about it, and I’m curious how other urbanists and housing advocates view this.
The first is that exurban or rural density isn’t weird at all—because that’s what a small town is! So why does it feel weird here? My supposition is that while the default American impulse is to complain about the density, the issue isn’t density but the lack of anything except residential development. In other words, low-density residential-only development feels natural to some extent, as does the varied (“mixed-use”) nature of the city. But high densities without any other uses or enterprises in proximity just feels weird.
The easiest way to get some kind of compromise would be to get these cluster developments to be truly mixed-use. That would require not only zoning reforms, but probably changes to the strict codes on home-based businesses. (Virginia’s application to license a home-based commercial kitchen demands a “List of all ingredients used in your business, with the source of each”—which is not something I think a chef in a restaurant is held to. (“Wow, this fresh fish would make an amazing special tonight!” “Yes chef, but we didn’t tell the state that we’d be using walleye in our kitchen.”)
I doubt that you could actually get “village”-style small local businesses without making it a lot easier to simply operate out of your home, but that is its own entire area of policy and controversy. In the absence of such small-scale commerce, you’re simply not going to get enough “regular” stores to serve every discrete housing development. Which puts you right back to strip plazas that serve a large surrounding trade area by car, or theoretically mixed-use developments which struggle to fill their retail spaces. In other words, mixed-use isn’t about buildings, it’s about people and commerce. And it’s about appropriate scale.
While it would be difficult, if we could actually make villages instead of tightly packed subdivisions, I bet people would like it! They might tell you they wouldn’t like it. And yet the same people who would tell you they wouldn’t like it lament that they can’t walk to a little bakery or corner store or deli or cafe. We mostly just don’t have a template for what that would look like, other than “the city.” So at best, with some actual creativity and reform, these cluster developments seem like really good opportunities to build genuine new towns or villages. Places that have some “center,” some measure of their own economy.
There are little bits and pieces of this here and there. Take a look at this development with a new, old-fashioned-looking church at the center! It’s very recent, and you can imagine maybe in 20 years a place like this maturing into a place.
But the other thing I have to say is that I’m not sure we’d even need cluster zoning if we built enough housing in the urban cores and inner suburbs. Whatever the merits of the land-use strategy, a non-zero number of the people living in these houses don’t want to live here. It isn’t a perfectly engineered product that meets people’s desires. It’s a bland, checks-the-boxes-and-constraints thing you settle for. So cluster or not, we could avoid building a lot of this stuff if we just built enough in the places more people want to live. Why are we building out the countryside at all for something a lot of people who end up there don’t affirmatively want?
Now, some people affirmatively want it. I got that viewpoint on Twitter where I had a couple of debates over this. Some people said something like, You move here because it’s cheap or because you don’t want urban life, you’re happy to give up a big lawn because your commute is long and you want to maximize family time, you like being closer to the country than to the city. In other words, the idea of good-sized houses on tiny lots far away from most things is actually exactly what some people want.
I don’t doubt that, but I’m quite certain a large share of the people who end up in these houses haven’t made that sort of explicit choice and haven’t been waiting for exactly this kind of house.
In another piece—scheduled, not published yet!—I write this:
Think of how many people say something like, We might stay in the city if there was less crime, or if we could afford it, or if the schools were better… This isn’t a preference against cities. It’s a preference for cities as they could be.
Similarly, somebody choosing an exurban small-lot home because they can afford it and because the long commute makes lawn work less feasible, etc. etc.—for some people, that’s an actual affirmative preference. But for a lot of them, it’s just what they can make work. When you think about it, “People like this housing because it’s cheap” is an argument against it—it’s a way of saying they don’t like it because they like it. And that low price is squeezed from both ends: the lower price is offset in part by the cost of commuting and driving, and the price of more proximate housing is artificially high because we don’t sufficiently build in those places.
Okay. So tell me if I’m wrong, and tell me if cluster zoning is good, bad, or complicated.
Related Reading:
Which Housing Is “Housing Crisis Housing”?
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I agree wholeheartedly with the mixed use point you made- it drives me nuts to see clusters of houses and townhomes all over the Denver suburbs with seemingly little attempt to make them anything other than “car islands”…granted, many seem adjacent to well developed open spaces/some trails but not easily walkable to any retail for a daily routine. So ok for outdoor recreational needs but less so for community connectedness/daily function without using a car.
Just some thoughts from a central Virginia exurbanite. Clustering commercial development makes sense in exurban and rural areas. That doesn’t just cut down on vehicle miles, by allowing people to combine errands in a single trip, but also makes it economically feasible to provide infrastructure like public water, sewer, and wired broadband - infrastructure that is not always available in exurban and rural areas.
Historically, small towns typically had hard limitations on density because of the dependence on private well and septic, and pre-1910 or so, because of the necessity for carriage houses and grazing space for horses. Not having public water and sewer is still a potential issue, since most of rural Virginia is on private well and septic.
Usually zoning for these areas does allow multiple uses in reasonably close proximity, including both residential and commercial uses, and most localities I am familiar with allow mixed use within current zoning categories. The ubiquitous agricultural zoning, which includes most land in rural areas, normally has both residential and commercial uses by right.
I have mixed feelings about clustered residential development in rural areas, but there is a real demand out here from retirees and singles for local housing that requires less property maintenance. It can be done well or badly, and I am not personally familiar with Lovettesville, so no judgement on those specific developments. It does face the same issues with potentially needing access to public water and sewer, as private well and septic, by design, are not a good fit for dense development.
Virginia IMHO doesn’t have particularly strict codes for most home based businesses, at least not in rural and exurban areas, and I say that as someone who has owned more than one home based business in a rural (later exurban) area.
People often sell at the farmers market and in local stores to avoid having to have a storefront, as well as selling online, since most people don’t really want a stream of strangers coming to their home. Local Facebook groups and Nextdoor are very active in promoting local small businesses, they’re featured in the local newsletter, and many local businesses with storefronts have racks for business cards of other local small businesses.
So I am not sure why you think exurban counties don’t have ample small-scale commerce. Our local village center has plenty of small stores and businesses including in older houses repurposed as commercial space, and my county has a LOT of home based businesses. There are a few national businesses, as in a small local Wal-Mart and a small Sheetz, a farm supply store, plus the ubiquitous auto parts stores and dollar stores. But most of the shops in our local strip plazas are small businesses who serve local residents, not national chains, and the national chain stores are set up on a local scale, not to serve a large surrounding area.
Commercial kitchens of any sort are licensed strictly so you don’t sicken or kill people, which is an actual risk. (Raw milk with potential issues of TB and brucellosis, poorly canned food, cross contamination, e Coli, salmonella, trichinosis.) That isn’t a consideration with most types of home based businesses.
I actually cannot ever remember hearing people out here lament that they couldn’t WALK to a bakery, cafe, corner store, or deli, but we have all of those out here, easily accessed by a very short car trip with minimal traffic, locally owned and operated. I would be very surprised if Lovettesville doesn’t.
Out here isn’t “far away from most things.” It’s closer to different things that many of us out here care about, like horseback riding, hiking trails, the river and boating, fishing, the farmers market, tons of local events at the state park and the village green space - peaceful, social things that make life worth living. There are many more events and activities out here than I have time to attend - small concerts, nature walks, fairs, festivals, you name it.
If you look at the Weldon Cooper Center statistics, when people can telecommute, or when they retire, a significant number choose to move to exurbs and more rural areas. Exurban and rural areas in Virginia are growing faster than the cities and closer suburbs.
It’s really, really nice out here, in its own way, with a different lifestyle. You obviously like city life, and that’s great! Not all of us do, and you know what, how we live is pretty great too.