A few weeks back I attended a day long seminar hosted by the Illinois chapter of The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). New Urbanism is a movement which seeks to reverse the destructive, unsustainable, and expensive sprawl-based design and planning policy that has been popular for the last 60 years and seeks to replace it with a human scaled system based on historic urban form and design precedent. The concept is to return a system of design which places people at the center rather than cars. Some interpret New Urbanism as a return to the use of historic looking buildings. Actually, New urbanism is more complex than surface appearance and is not dependent on buildings having any particular style. New Urbanism is a way of making space and combining uses that allow for active walkable and sustainable urban environments.
The conference was well worth my time but I was left feeling a little flat through all but one presentation. All the programs were informative. All but that one covered public policy, legal techniques for changing laws, and revised zoning concepts. Discussion, of course, also focused on forms and design principles that can make for great New Urban places. The presentations were very academic and fact based. What they lacked was a discussion of how you can change the psychology of the people who have come to accept sprawl based development as the natural way things should be done. How do you get people to question the standard way of doing things which they now take for granted as the best way to do things? The conference was basically a “preaching to the chorus” situation. The people giving the presentation were selling an idea to people who already accept and understand its benefits. I asked how they plan to sell New Urbanism to a public that has no interest in what they are selling. The answer was basically that all they had to do was show people how great new urbanism is. Hmm, Really? Good luck with that!
The best presentation of the day was the last presentation. It was given by a pair of young civil engineers, Robert J. Bielaski and Jerremy D. Foss. This was interesting in itself, in that civil engineers are one of the major players in and promoters of the American sprawl based built environment. The joke is that civil engineers are educated to move cars and water and eliminate the need for people. That being said I found it to be an extremely pleasant surprise that these engineers took such a great interest in new urbanism and that they were using their professional knowledge and tools of their profession to advance the cause of reversing the damage of sprawl. Their presentation was the singular attempt of the day to address the issue of public buy-in to New Urbanism.
Their presentation focused on the cost of sprawl based development versus the cost of dense urban based development of residential streets. If there is anything that can get people’s attention it is the impact on their wallet by public policy. Bielaski and Foss presented the initial results of their study of the cost of infrastructure. They tallied the basic infrastructure costs required for these very different concepts for building and compared them. They showed that sprawl is very expensive. The basis of the study was a comparison of the costs of infrastructure for a typical Chicago city lot and alley with 25 feet of street frontage versus the typical contemporary Chicago area suburban lot with 80 feet of street frontage. They added the cost of construction roads, curbs, sewers, utilities, sidewalks and lighting to serve the area of each type of residential street design. They factored the additional frontage at corner lots and spread the cost to typical lots. They added the costs and divided the total by the number of residential units to get a cost per residential unit for the associated street frontage. Basically they looked at what each residential unit should pay to replace the street. They wanted to determine if the cost was different for one development pattern over another and if so would the cost be significant enough for municipalities and home owners to alter their choices in how we build municipalities.
Their findings included the following:
Based on typical basic construction and specifications standards used in suburban and urban areas along with a factor of construction difficulty Foss and Bielaski determined that an municipality can expect to spend about $489 per linear foot of lot frontage in suburban areas and about $879 per linear foot of lot frontage in and urban zone. They calculated these costs on a per unit basis the costs are as follows:
Suburban Single family = $27,000 per housing unit
Urban Single Family = $18,000 per housing unit
Urban Two Flat = $6,225 per housing unit.
These numbers show that the suburban cost is between 150% and 434% more expensive to build per residential unit than its urban counterpart!
It is clear that initial cost for the sprawl based system is substantially more than the high density system even when using a higher unit cost for the urban specification. The counter argument is the developer pays for the street and folds it into the cost of the house. But, the developer does not pay for the replacement and maintenance of the street over time. This is paid for by the municipality out of tax receipts. So Bielaski and Foss also calculated the amount a municipality must bank to keep that road in working order in perpetuity. Bielaski and Foss calculated this cost based on typical life time expectancies. They found that a municipality should be budgeting approximately these amounts based on the type of development they are supporting:
Suburban single family = $830/ year (22010 dollars) $3,025/year (2050 dollars)
Urban Single Family = $594/year (2010 dollars) $2151/year (2050 dollars)
Urban Two Flat = $198/year (2010 dollars) $717/year (2050 dollars)
This means a municipality must budget between 140% and 419% more money in the low density sprawl style scenario for maintenance!
It is clear, intuitively, that sprawl based development is much more expensive than a high density system. It just takes much more stuff to support people in an environment that is more spread out. That extra stuff is not free! These figures provide hard evidence to back up that intuition. This study covers only a small tip of the giant sprawl cost-bomb that we have created in this country. The study has not yet been expanded to include the added cost of lengthy feeder roads, highways, environmental damage, simple maintenance activities such as plowing, and wear and tear on municipal vehicles from longer miles traveled. Many communities have built a pyramid scheme with sprawl costs. Continued growth paid the bills while relatively new infrastructure did not yet need any of that costly maintenance spending. Since the economic bubble burst the chickens have come home to roost for many communities and their budgets have collapsed. In the mean time slow / no growth places like metro Buffalo have continued to expand infrastructure with a declining population base and a long term stagnant economy. The results of this shell game are clear with abandonment of large parts of the city, deferred infrastructure maintenance throughout the area, and quickly declining inner ring suburbs. Sprawl is not a natural process. It does not have to be accepted and it needs to be stopped. One way and maybe the only way to stop sprawl is to make the people who chose sprawl pay for sprawl.
If you are interested in contacting the authors of the sprawl cost study you can reach them at these email addresses:
Jerremy D. Foss, P.E. jfoss@manhard.com
Robert J. Bielaski, P.E. rbielaski@spacecoinc.com