Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [124]
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Michael Replogle, Transportation Conformity and Demand Management, 22. While the Japanese spend 9 percent of their gross national product on transportation, Americans spend 15 to 18 percent. Our excessive family expenditure on automobiles is matched by tremendous corporate spending on parking lots and garages.
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In considering a move to suburbia, parents must ask themselves such fundamental questions as how much television they want their children to watch. A study comparing ten-year-olds in suburban California and small-town Vermont found that the Vermont children had three times the mobility—independent access to desired destinations—while the Orange County children watched four times as much television (Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis, 9). No wonder Philip Langdon feels compelled to say that “A modern subdivision is an instrument for making people stupid” (Langdon, A Better Place to Live, 49). Some have even argued that a modern subdivision is a place for making people unhappy. In ultra-suburban Santa Clara County, California, there were more divorces in the early eighties than marriages (Langdon Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House,” 46).
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“Most Americans Are Overweight,” The New York Times, October 16, 1996, C9. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 22 percent of American children are obese, twice the level of ten years ago (Kilborn, A21).
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Michael Phillips, “Welfare’s Urban Poor Need a Lift—to Suburban Jobs,” B1. According to a U.S. Congress study, two thirds of all new jobs are in the suburbs, while three quarters of welfare recipients live in the center city or rural areas. In addition, 95 percent of welfare recipients do not own cars (Hank Dittmar, “Congressional Findings in Tea-21,” 10).
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A better policy would be to require that new workplaces be located within walking distance of transit. This solution is within the power of local zoning ordinances, but could be further encouraged by making it a precondition to federal transit funding.
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Myron Orfield, Metropolitics, 71. Moreover, inner-city households pay subsidies 50 percent higher than the regional average. To add insult to injury, this infrastructure is unnecessary, as nearly one quarter of the Minneapolis–St. Paul urban area served by sewers remains undeveloped (72). Why, then, were these new sewers built? The answer is complicated, but is likely to include the fact that they made privately owned farmland much more valuable.
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David Rusk has confirmed this point statistically in his book Cities Without Suburbs. But the focus on keeping all revenue within the municipal boundary still begs the question of how long an urban organism can sustain itself as it sprawls inefficiently outward while abandoning its own center. David Petersen of Price Waterhouse has gone one step further and demonstrated that a sustainable urban area requires a critical mass of residential, shopping, and entertainment uses within one mile of the downtown (David Petersen, “Smart Growth for Center Cities,” 51).
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This may not last, as a nascent back-to-the-city movement could soon give Houston a downtown that can compete against its fabled Galleria. Interestingly, unlike in most East Coast cities, in Houston the urban settlers are less brash pioneers than disgruntled suburbanites who have given up on a failed freeway system. The recent huge investment in downtown housing should improve this situation quickly.
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Less formal versions of regional consolidation may be easier to institute, such as the New York Regional Planning Association, an influential nonprofit agency established in 1929 to provide more coordinated growth across the political boundaries of the Tri-State area. The RPA continues to evolve in its guidance; one of its most recent initiatives is the promotion of suburban-ring transit connections. One indication of how difficult formal regional planning can be is Kansas City Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver’s recent signing of what has been called a “Non-Aggression Treaty