« Asbestos issues possible | Main | Know an area gone to seed? »
The upside of urban sprawl
Economist challenges concept of smart growth. People won't give up cars, he argues
A U.S. economist says Toronto is heading down the wrong path with its efforts at intensification.
Smart growth, a cornerstone of the city's new Official Plan, is anything but, says Randal O'Toole, an economist and director of the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute since 1975.
The Thoreau Institute seeks ways to protect the environment without regulation, bureaucracy, or central control. (American essayist and poet Henry David Thoreau believed that government is best which governs least.)
O'Toole presented his views at a lecture entitled "Smart Growth or Dense Thinking?" given Tuesday by the Greater Toronto Home Builders' Association. His talk was based on his book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, in which he contends that the war on sprawl is really a war on lifestyle choices and an attack on the automobile.
Speaking from a U.S. perspective, O'Toole says that freedom, auto mobility and owning a home are the cornerstones of the American Dream.
Smart growth — also known as the new urbanism or sustainable communities — is intended to curb automobile usage and urban sprawl by allowing people to walk more and use public transit. But can changing land use reduce driving? O'Toole answers a resounding no.
For starters, he argues, people like to drive and automobile use is on the rise, both in the United States (where 86 per cent of travel is by car) and in Europe (79 per cent).
He says studies at the University of California show people want to drive about 20 minutes to work, in order to prepare for their day or to decompress at the end of it.
"We aren't auto dependent, we're auto liberated," he says, adding that he doesn't like to drive and prefers to ride a bicycle or take the train.
Mobility allows people to buy affordable homes in the suburbs and get better-paying jobs in cities, as well as to buy cheaper goods at big-box stores.
Homes appreciate more than condos, he contends, and therefore contribute to wealth, as the most important source of funds for new businesses is a mortgage on the business owner's home. Intensification, or "densification," drives up land prices, takes away choices, and actually leads to further congestion, he contends.
In the U.S., he states, traffic congestion costs the country more than $70 billion and contributes to more pollution, as cars stuck in stop-and-go traffic pollute more.
He suggests that, instead of curbing sprawl, we need decentralized, cost-efficient, low-capacity transit for those who can't, or choose not to, drive. Ditto road tolls; people could choose high-occupancy lanes (no solo drivers) without charge or be stuck in traffic. "Fair lanes" would allow low-income drivers who need to use toll lanes to get their tolls back.
He says a study based on 1990 U.S. census data showed that two-thirds of rush-hour drivers were not commuters and therefore had a choice not to drive at peak periods. (Some were parents driving children to and from school, he admits.)
He's not a fan of zoning. Once a method implemented to protect neighbourhoods, it's now a "hammer" used to change areas against people's will, he claims.
Instead, he proposes "protective covenants" negotiated between a developer and a small community of roughly 150 homes. He says people in some U.S. cities who have entered into these agreements are happier. He cites Houston — the largest city in the U.S. without zoning — as a successful example.
A little more than 10 per cent of cities in the U.S. operate without zoning, he says.
Land restriction in the Greater Toronto Area is having a dramatic impact on the price of serviced lots and new housing, the GTHBA notes in a research report released at the lecture.
Proposed greenbelt legislation could further exacerbate the problem, it says.
GTA residential construction contributed $11.78 billion to the national economy, the report states.
While it strongly supports measures to promote intensification, the home builders' group says it is already building at some of the highest densities in North America, with condos representing 30 per cent of all new home sales. More than 70 per cent of all new homes in the GTA are on lots of 40 feet or less — "hardly urban sprawl," the group contends.
In addition, even with intensification, it believes the City of Toronto cannot meet all of the GTA's future population growth. It can only accommodate 537,000 people by 2031 under its Official Plan, yet expects the GTA to grow by nearly 2.4 million in that same period.
May 8, 2004 in Location, Location ... | Permalink
Comments
It's a matter of incentives. If (and there is good reason to believe it's true) we've reached or are close to the Hubert's peak in oil production) then you can expect a sustaine rise in oil prices over time. Europe shows that car travel is sensitive to gas prices... so, perhaps Toronto is merely getting ahead in doing work that will need to be done before too long anyway.
Posted by: Ian Welsh | May 9, 2004 12:15:23 AM
Yeah, exactly.. this is all well and good.. anyone but the most self-blindfolded smart growth advocate can admit the "benefits" of sprawl. But Randal O'Toole completely ignores declining oil / oil supply instability, the subsidization of highways for all of that "decentralized" car + transit, the spillover (externality) effects of all the phenomena he deals with, and, in other words, all long-term effects. His perspective is dazzlingly simplistic - sometimes it's a wonder certain people can get speaking gigs solely based on their "rebel" image.
Posted by: Mike Flynn | May 13, 2004 2:39:51 PM
What pathetic lives certain people must lead if they WANT TO drive 40 minutes a day in order to be able to deal with their jobs! Are they not able to prepare for their job or 'decompress' after work without being in a car? Could it be that these people just never considered walking, biking or public transit as an alternative and equal or superior way to prepare for work?
Posted by: Dahna Kane | May 17, 2004 1:48:07 PM
If Houston is his example of what a city looks like without zoning laws then I would take Portland or Toronto. All suburbs since the 1950's have been planned by transportation (highway) engineers, not for transit or walking. It was only before the 1940's that truly unplanned cities were built, and they were very transit supportive. In Houston as in other cities you need to provide roads wide enough to turn a fire engine around in, on-site parking requirements, Department of transportation mandated arterials and Federal and state money for interstates. All this has given Houston traffic congestion which has forced it to start building lrt lines. Too little too late?
Posted by: roger brook | May 18, 2004 4:06:42 PM
If Houston is his example of what a city looks like without zoning laws then I would take Portland or Toronto. All suburbs since the 1950's have been planned by transportation (highway) engineers, not for transit or walking. It was only before the 1940's that truly unplanned cities were built, and they were very transit supportive. In Houston as in other cities you need to provide roads wide enough to turn a fire engine around in, on-site parking requirements, Department of transportation mandated arterials and Federal and state money for interstates. All this has given Houston traffic congestion which has forced it to start building lrt lines. Too little too late?
Posted by: roger brook | May 18, 2004 4:06:59 PM
https://ocpl.ece.arizona.edu/compwiki/CategoryComp_All?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=icon.htm#73715006 >beauty [url=https://ocpl.ece.arizona.edu/compwiki/CategoryComp_All?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=icon.htm#69758138]beauty[/url] https://ocpl.ece.arizona.edu/compwiki/CategoryComp_All?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=icon.htm 430459635
Posted by: domain | Nov 26, 2007 4:24:37 PM
