"Fighting Sprawl"
For decades now, city planners have been decrying "urban sprawl" and the decreasing density of our cities. This brings with it a host of problems, such as increased commuting times, pollution, loss of undeveloped wilderness area, etc. But primarily, I think these city planners just hate suburbs -- they find them unsightly and not in keeping with their preferred aesthetics, the dense urban city and the unpopulated outdoors.
Of course, the problem they always run into is that people love to live in suburbs, and Americans by and large still want a house with a yard. This Newsweek article shows that people are starting to accept this. City planners have been fighting a losing battle -- instead of trying to get people to live in dense areas they don't want to, perhaps they should instead embrace the medium-density cities people want (i.e. suburbs) and make that environment better. The article comments thatEuropeans -- whose cities are held out by these "smart-growth" anti-sprawl city planners as the ideal -- who come to America are delighted by suburbs, and often aspire to own their own home, which is impossible back home. (By way of comparison, more than half the apartments in Paris are under 46 square meters -- about 550 square feet for we Americans -- and sell for over 6,000 Euro per square meter. Here, college students have more space than that.) Of course, in a sense, much of Europe is low-density suburb, they just explain it away by not considering it part of the small, dense cities at all.
The article considers accepting suburbs to mean bringing the arts and businesses to those suburbs, thus making more of what people want available without coming into the city. However, there's one thing missing from this calculus -- most of the jobs are still in the city, and suburban living involves increasingly long commutes.
This other article -- from the same issue of Newsweek, no less -- is a great example of the fact that accepting suburbs has only come so far. The "fastest-growing group of commuters" (whatever that means) is now those who commute more than 90 minutes each way. Americans order a quarter of their restaurant meals from their cars, and eat 32 meals a year while driving. McDonald's is selling food that fits in your cupholder now, and car manufacturers are giving you more of them (three for the driver alone in some vehicles.) The Dodge Caliber includes a refrigerator in the glove box and a passenger seat that folds down into a dining table.
On one hand, this may seem like accepting people's preferred living arrangements by making the commute less painful. But it's not really -- truly accepting where people want to live would mean not making everyone drive into the city. It's strange that at the same time as people are talking about "work/life balance" and rebeling against 60+ hour workweeks, they're adding 15 hours to their workweek by spending it in their cars. Consider how much unproductive time is wasted.
Telecommuting is one way to eliminate this, but it's not the only way. Another would be reducing the emphasis on downtown prestige offices. Why does a company need to put all its employees in a monolithic office in a skyscraper? How often to they need to communicate to each other in person, rather than by email and phone? The answer of course varies by company and type of employee. However, at my current employer, all the IT people are in four floors of one building, with a very small support staff (two HR folks, a couple receptionists, and some purchasing reps), while other corporate functions are in entirely different buildings. There's no reason that any of those buildings need to be located downtown. There's the occasional meeting from those of us in one building with those of us in another... but they're only occasional.
Many companies are like that, having semi-isolated "silos" that are located together either because "they always have been" or just to give the company a desirable downtown address. My question is, what's so desirable about a downtown address?
Living in the suburbs of Seattle, I've seen what a livable suburb can be. When I didn't work downtown, I could go for months without making the 25-minute drive into the city -- there are enough businesses and employers in the suburbs as to make it unnecessary. Despite this, the Seattle area truly lives up to its name as the "Emerald City" when you get out of the city proper -- there are so many trees and green spaces as to make a beautiful living environment. Of course, just as the cities try to "fight sprawl" and make themselves more dense and urban, the suburbs have their own form of inanity -- regulations to limit the height of buildings and to drive out businesses so as to retain their "rural character." Still, a balanced, medium-density community can work, and seems to be what most people want to live in. Anything that reduces how many people have to spend 90 minutes on a highway every morning is a step in the right direction.