When will we get some common sense back to land planning and city planning? I understand why New Urbanism got so strong - as there were not other solutions, so it is politically advantageous to hold onto something - but today there are new options for design - ones that make far more sense.

Sandy

1 - “It supports “urban service boundaries” that makes land outside the boundary very hard to develop, which artificially (and some would say catastrophically) raises the price of land. This makes homes less affordable.”

The SmartCode and New Urbanism in general does not support “urban service boundaries,” rather it allocates the size and intensity of communities based on the environmental sensitivity or agricultural usefulness of the land, and on availability of existing infrastructure. You may have hamlets almost anywhere except protected habitats, but your regional centers should be assigned to existing thoroughfares and transit. Regardless of the size or intensity of the community, it must be planned according to one or more pedestrian sheds, so that walking is one of the transportation options for at least some of your daily needs, and so that children, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor are not dependent on those who drive.

2 - “It emphasizes public space, expensively maintained by public entities and paid for by taxpayers, over private space.”

It regulates both. The street is conceived as a public space and designed for comfort and safety of pedestrians and bicyclists as well as the car. New Urbanists have been designing “complete streets” for over two decades. Private space is regulated by lot size, building type (NOT style), frontage type, etc. so that walkability, safety, and diverse options in living arrangements are enabled. There are large and small lots, large and small houses, and mixes of uses within the overall neighborhood.

3 - “It makes war on the car, despite the fact that most people prefer cars and despite the fact that cars are on the verge of becoming totally green. It advocates zero freeway upgrades despite massive population growth, in order to force people into mass transit.”

No, it does not make war on the car. It accommodates the car in a way that does not continue the degradation of the public realm we have seen for 60 years. Parking and thoroughfares are given at least 15 pages in the SmartCode and its Modules, but parking *location* and holistic street design are critical because thoughtless parking location and overwide, high-speed streets have destroyed the public realm. Regarding “freeway upgrades,” I forget who said this, but “Widening a road to accommodate more traffic is like a fat man loosening his belt so he can eat more.” The key to alleviating congestion is providing networks of connected streets like those in traditional neighborhoods and cities. The network is to the city as the wetlands are to the coasts - absorptive, so there is no flood in any one place. (By the way, “green” cars wouldn’t do a thing to reduce driving - they would encourage more sprawl and traffic accidents and dependence on drivers and more highway and parking infrastructure, i.e, more impervious surface.

4 - “It promotes infill in quiet, preexisting suburbs where neighbors should not see their low density lifestyle destroyed by “special planning” areas where literally 10x as many new units are on an acre compared to within the neighborhood at large.”

I don’t know what’s going on in the places you reference, but the SmartCode (and NU in general) employs transect-based planning that does not support development that is out of context with its immediate surroundings.

5 - “It places a premium on open space, but offers no criticism of land use even more inefficient than low density homes and ranchettes, such as irrigated, subsidized corn ethanol farms.”

You are free to prohibit that use on Table 12 when you customize the model code.

6 - “It presumes that social problems will be alleviated through forcing everyone to live in ultra high density neighborhoods; it supports cramming affordable housing units into higher income neighborhoods, undermining the incentives that inspired people to work hard and earn their way into a higher income neighborhood.”

I don’t actually understand this criticism. It sounds like you mean you wouldn’t want your children or parents to be able to afford to live in the same neighborhood you do.

7 - “It maintains there is a shortage of open space and farmland, and at least in the USA, there is not.”

New Urbanism never maintains any such thing. One of the NU leaders routinely reminds us that 95% of America is considered “undeveloped.” Greenfield development is part of our toolkit, but it must be in the form mentioned above, i.e., planned with pedestrian sheds, to reduce overall driving and impervious surface.

8 -” New Urbanism pretends they have the final answer; that their precepts are beyond debate. … for everyone’s sake debate on AGW and New Urbanism should be welcomed, not ridiculed.”

Informed debate is always welcomed. I’ve never seen a group that loved debate more than the New Urbanists.

“And if trees are the solution, mandate them. ”

They are mandated, because they are essential environmentally and urbanistically. See Section 5.11 for the private frontage and Section 3.7 and Tables 4A, 4B, and 6 and Module 4C for the public frontage.

Sandy Sorlien

Wrt Stone’s paper that you don’t want to understand:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

– Marcel Proust

Lastly, your eight assertions are so far off, so not grounded in any knowledge base, so rife with misconceptions, so entrenched in ideological maintenance and back-asswardsness that I’m afraid I must enact my personal rule to not argue or deliberate with residents of Wingnuttia. I’ll never get that time back, alas.

Keep using your rhetoric and this argumentation, Ed. Please.

You’ll make my - and other planner’s - jobs a lot easier when contrasted with you and this ideological position.

Best regards.

DS

There are more examples. And the photo I display at the top of this story is quite typical. What are you saying, that it is easier to plant trees in areas such as depicted in this photo, where you’ve got 8-10 homes per acre, than it is to plant them in a lower density development?

In general you seem to be cherry picking the conclusions you want to hear, at the same time as you fail to acknowledge areas where we might agree. I have never criticized high density housing in downtown areas. And I don’t consider places like Tracy, California, to be low density developments; they are high density developments in my opinion. And I have no more enthusiasm for a “McSuburb” than you.

I’m going to reiterate my criticisms of new urbanism:

1 - It supports “urban service boundaries” that makes land outside the boundary very hard to develop, which artificially (and some would say catastrophically) raises the price of land. This makes homes less affordable.

2 - It emphasizes public space, expensively maintained by public entities and paid for by taxpayers, over private space.

3 - It makes war on the car, despite the fact that most people prefer cars and despite the fact that cars are on the verge of becoming totally green. It advocates zero freeway upgrades despite massive population growth, in order to force people into mass transit.

4 - It promotes infill in quiet, preexisting suburbs where neighbors should not see their low density lifestyle destroyed by “special planning” areas where literally 10x as many new units are on an acre compared to within the neighborhood at large.

5 - It places a premium on open space, but offers no criticism of land use even more inefficient than low density homes and ranchettes, such as irrigated, subsidized corn ethanol farms.

6 - It presumes that social problems will be alleviated through forcing everyone to live in ultra high density neighborhoods; it supports cramming affordable housing units into higher income neighborhoods, undermining the incentives that inspired people to work hard and earn their way into a higher income neighborhood.

7 - It maintains there is a shortage of open space and farmland, and at least in the USA, there is not. California is projected to add 13 million people to their population within the next 25 years. If you put all of those people into homes on 1 acre lots with households of 3.5 people, you would only use up 6,500 square miles - that will never happen, because as you correctly state, many people prefer high density living. But if they were dispersed in this manner, 6,500 square miles is a small fraction of California’s 158,000 square miles. In all, only about 4% of the USA is urbanized - not much at all.

8 - New Urbanism pretends they have the final answer; that their precepts are beyond debate. The new urbanists share this trait with the anthropogenic CO2 alarmists; they also tend to march in lockstep with the anthropogenic global warming crowd, and use AGW concerns as trump cards to roll over opposition to their plans and policies. I think the AGW issue is nuanced - example: European carbon offset credits created the global market for subsidized biodiesel, which is the direct cause of massive deforestation throughout Asia (want to talk about heat islands?) - and for everyone’s sake debate on AGW and New Urbanism should be welcomed, not ridiculed.

As for Stone’s study - he is welcome to comment here or even submit a guest post, as are you. But you cannot convince me that covering something like 70% of the ground with roofs, cement and asphalt per the new urbanist model is going to be more reflective than a low density suburb. And if trees are the solution, mandate them. You want to mandate everything else. It is certainly more feasible to plant trees in a low density suburb than in neighborhoods where people are packed on top of each other 10-20 units per acre.

You don’t understand the paper, Ed.

Higher density land uses have LESS HEAT ABSORPTION because their surfaces have a higher albedo (lower flux because of higher reflectivity) and greater %age of shading where canopy exists. The lawn surfaces and replacement of natural vegetation in large-lot developments makes MORE HEAT ABSORPTION due to the lower albedo from darker surfaces and less evapotranspiration than woodland/forest it replaced (lawn is dark and has less ET than woodlot-forest-ag due to lower overall leaf surface area). Not to mention the greater nitrification from lawns in large-lot development (Arden Creek in Sacto was most nitrified water body in US in early 2000s, from lawns and landscaping of the rich people in large lots along the creek).

And you are confused yet again with this statement the policy environment is making it relatively easy to buy a high-density home, but is making low density housing unaffordable.

This is bass-ackwards for many reasons. Because the low-density affordable homes are on the fringe, where people drive to qualify: Lodi, Lathrop, Tracy. These are low-density areas with affordable developments due to lower land rents, permitting and impact fees, labor making per-unit [any unit] costs far cheaper than on the peninsula. Amazing how wrong your statement is. The unmet market demand for NU homes drives up equilibirum rents until demand is met - thus making this sort of development MORE expensive than low-density snouthouses lacking nearby amenities, as in a McSuburb. Not to mention that NU developments’ prices haven’t fallen as far as McSuburb prices in this downturn. And developments that lack amenites (as in McSuburbs on the fringe) are more affordable precisely because they lack amenities and the poor sods who live there have to jump in the car for every d*mn thing, which keeps rents down.

You also, Ed, haven’t shown a 14 DU/ac SFD with 350 sf garage project on the ground - you know, what you claim is crowding out the precious 4 DU/ac that everybody and their brother wants. How are you coming with backing that claim, and what is the fraction of that project to overall permitting? And is the 14 DU/ac similar to the cr*ppy foto you put at the top of this post (that you wish to imply everything is built this way). or does it have a treelawn, and what is the open space set-aside %?

Best regards,

DS

Obviously the tradeoff between high and low density is that while the high density may have a much higher heat absorption than low density, it also is home to far more people, leaving open space that has low heat absorption.

But are we permitting low density housing with zoning contingent on planting tree canopy, or building reflective roof and pavement surfaces? No. And why aren’t we comparing low density housing to farmland in terms of environmental impact? The idea that low density exurbs are somehow more disruptive to ecosystems or climate than irrigated (and subsidized) corn ethanol farms is certainly debateable - to use a pertinent example. And where are the trees in the high density development shown in the photo at the top of this post? Maybe the high density neighborhoods you design aren’t as high density as the norm here in California. Because there is NO room for trees in the neighborhood in that photo.

At the end of the day, the policy environment is making it relatively easy to buy a high-density home, but is making low density housing unaffordable. I think this is wrong, for all the reasons I’ve stated. People who love nature and want their own yard should be able to pay a reasonable price and achieve that dream.

Again, just because something is “compact” doesn’t mean it’s “Smart Growth”.

Let us stop confusing the two.

DS