Dedensification Patterns

Unfortunately this trend of city dedensification is occurring beyond the US with rising incomes which prompt increased automobile ownership. I believe that the federal government needs to take corrective action, and get serious about "smart growth" policies. For starters, removing the home mortgage interest deduction will discourage people from buying cheap suburban homes that fuel sprawl. State and federal governments should remove indirect subsidies by ending construction of roads and other infrastructure to these outlying areas. Increasing taxes on automobiles, raising the fuel tax, and instituting congestion pricing mechanisms are all necessary to make people modify their behavior. Extreme waste is endemic in the American "way of life" and it is time for policy makers to step up to the plate to make the sprawling suburbs of Phoenix and Charlotte unaffordable. The net cost savings from enacting such policies would be enormous. Healthcare costs alone would drop by billions of dollars if Americans were forced out of their autos. Policy makers who are serious about curbing foreign energy dependence and move towards a healthier more sustainable future need to make a calculated decision that would push dense, livable city patterns over sprawl.

Posted by: Nicholas Mansfield | 4/25/11

Using language

You are correct in using the phrase "proponents of downtown living" and illustrates one of the issues. It seem to me that such a term "proponent" suggests something which should you should do because it's good for you, like eating spinach. An awful lot of the public discussion about cities is driven by fears -- "sustainability" and "peak oil." As someone who simply _likes_ and _enjoys_ cities, such downtown living proponents strike me as weak allies. The best reason to like cities is because of pleasure, not fear.

Posted by: David Sucher | 4/30/11

More Confusing Use of Density Statistics

Fair points, but your reference (late in the article) to the densities of various incorporated cities raises two problems that are common in popular urbanist literature. First of all, as you well know, incorporated cities are meaningless units for discussing urban form. Many "new, young" cities incorporate a lot of low-density car-oriented area that's excluded from the city limits of may older cities. I argued here that all reference to incorporated cities in discussions of American urban trends should be treated as potentially misleading: http://www.humantransit.org/2011/04/the-cities-vs-suburbs-trope.html Second, if you want to make coherent claims about density, consider population-based measures rather than area based measures. Conventional density measures, such as you use, answer the question "How many people are spread over each fixed unit of area?" It's as though the area is the cake and its population is the icing. Instead, ask: "What is the distribution of densities at which people in this city live?" You're making claims about people, while using data about area, which is a problem though a near-universal one. For more on that, see here: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/10/can-we-make-density-make-sense.html

Posted by: Jarrett Walker | 5/1/11

Change the property tax system to encourage density

There's a simple change we could make that would greatly increase density: stop taxing property based on improvement value and instead tax it solely based on land value. This would encourage land owners to develop their property to the highest and best use. Apartment and condo dwellers would no longer have to pay (whether directly or indirectly) for the expensive infrastructure required by owners of single family homes.

Posted by: Nirad | 5/1/11

Downtown populations are growing

This article implies that increases in Downtown housing were just speculative bubbles. Not so. There are more people living in downtowns from Boston to Los Angeles now than there were 10 or 20 years ago. It's true that was speculative construction, as always happens in our "free market" housing construction system. Some places, like Miami, were more speculative than others. But when the bubbles burst, they left behind lots of viable new buildings and even neighborhoods.

Posted by: Wanderer | 6/6/11