The Three-Acre Lot Versus Town Center

Barbara Bezdek describes herself as a “city dweller.” But earlier this year, she packed up her family’s home in Baltimore to move to the suburbs. “What really did it for us is education,” Bezdek says. “When I first moved to the city, part of what I wanted to do was to make the school one that all of the middle class parents would want to send their kids to. By the time we finally had a child of school age, the schools just hadn’t gotten any better — in fact the rap was they’d gotten still worse.”

“I still have the ‘I Love City Life’ bumper sticker on my car — because of the city’s culture amenities and street life. We feel connected to that and so does our daughter.”

On the other side of the country, Paul and Sarah Edwards recently moved from Santa Monica, an urbane town surrounded by Los Angeles, to Pine Mountain, a gated community an hour and forty minutes north, surrounded by Los Padres National Forest. Paul sees the move as the achievement of a long-standing dream:

“When we were in our 20s, we drove up the coast to Vancouver. On the route, we discovered a place in Oregon called Otter Rock with forested mountains that literally come down to the sea. In our mind, it was idyllic. We said, gee, if only we could ever live here — but we couldn’t make a living. We put that in the back of our mind.”

“Everyone in the city says, ‘What on earth do you do there?’ But everything you could do in [Los Angeles] was such a hassle. The getting in and getting out, the parking. We didn’t do very much in L.A. even though there was everything to do,” Sarah reflects. “I don’t think that I could ever go back to the city.”

Can Smart Growth Meet Consumer Preferences?

Whatever one thinks about suburban sprawl, one must acknowledge that it has, for the past two generations, been the choice for most Americans with any degree of mobility. Smart growth will only succeed if communities and developers can create dense, walkable urban and suburban communities that large numbers of people will choose over suburban sprawl.

In most of the country, creating such choices will do much more to stop sprawl than the most commonly prescribed solution to the sprawl problem: the “urban growth boundary,” a line beyond which new development is forbidden. This concept comes largely from Portland, Oregon. There, such a boundary has constrained development for almost three decades. It is important to note that the boundary’s effectiveness has been limited by unintended escape valves, such as the typical suburban sprawl a half-hour north across the Washington state line, where the boundary does not apply. But these limitations are minor compared to the big picture: the vast majority of new development in the Portland area has happened inside the boundary, which has led to a strengthening of older neighborhoods and a more walkable, transit-accessible development pattern over the past three decades — a pattern that runs counter to the experience of almost all American cities. No wonder smart growth advocates want to mimic Portland.

However, the main condition that makes such a boundary feasible and fairly successful for Portland — a strong region-wide government that has power over both urban and suburban land use decisions — is not present in the vast majority of American metropolitan areas. Take, for example, the rapidly developing U.S. Highway 1 edge city of central New Jersey, a technology park-heavy corridor between the campuses of Princeton and Rutgers Universities. There, driving down County Route 614, one sees townhomes on one side of the road and farmland on the other. What one does not see is the invisible line in the middle of the road that separates Plainsboro Township, which has designated this corridor as its main growth area, from South Brunswick Township, which has protected it as an agricultural preserve. Here, as in much of America, two towns can rarely coordinate land use, let alone an entire metropolitan area.

In these fragmented metropolises, the most basic question for the future is how many people, like the Bezdeks, would choose a more urban lifestyle if the right combination of services and amenities existed, and how many people, like the Edwardses, want above all else to live in a setting far removed from urban hustle and bustle. If most people would, given the right conditions and services, choose a more urban lifestyle, the challenge for smart growth advocates is creating such opportunities. If most people, however, prefer living on large lots in a suburban or quasi-rural, “exurban” setting regardless of services, smart growth is doomed to fail.

Why People Leave

So why do people leave cities? Dr. Tom Bier, Director of the Housing Policy Research Program at Cleveland State University’s College of Urban Affairs, decided to answer that question by asking the people leaving cities themselves.

In 1996, from a random sample of Cleveland households that had moved in the past year, Bier collected detailed information on why 380 households had left the city. This survey found that over 40% of households listed better schools, safety, or general city services as their number one reason for moving. If these elements had been available in an urban neighborhood, presumably most of these households would have at least thought seriously about moving to such a neighborhood. An additional 26% listed place-specific reasons for moving — but not ones that have to do inherently with urban life. Such reasons included being closer to a job, closer to friends, or moving away from troublesome neighbors. These results parallel both earlier surveys Bier did in Cleveland in 1988 and 1992 and a recent national survey by Fannie Mae on the topic.

Only 21% of households moved primarily because they wanted a newer or larger house. These are the households that truly care about the greater amounts of space and housing variety found in the suburbs. Bier argues that even many of the households he surveyed who wanted a larger home could be happy in Cleveland, or one of its older suburbs, given the right choices.

“I think the heart of the matter is that when someone is economically successful, they’d like to live in something that gives them more than what they have,” Bier said. “They want something more and they can afford it. The question is where are the choices for what they can afford. Around here, the way that the development and investment pattern has been loaded for decades is mostly in the other direction, for most people. We’ve always had people who wanted to live downtown or close in, but they wanted to live in a certain kind of property, which our public policies have not promoted.”

Bier points to new homes being built in Hough, an east side Cleveland neighborhood that twenty years ago was written off for dead, as an example of how cities can find ways to meet the demand of people who want newer and larger homes.

“A group of friends were sitting together one night in a suburb. They all wanted to live in Cleveland, so they went to the Mayor and said that they wanted to live in Hough in new houses. The Mayor got them the land — and they all came in together. That was news. People [started to] say ‘you can do that here?’ and [then] ‘I want one there.’”

Another indication that a strong market exists for urban development patterns with good city services comes from research on the pricing of developments which incorporate smart growth principles. A 1999 national study by the Urban Land Institute, the most prominent national think tank for the real estate development industry, found that buyers are on average willing to pay a $20,000 premium for such developments over what they would pay for a standard suburban development in the same location. Robert Liberty, who spent the past eight years as Executive Director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, the powerful smart growth organization largely responsible for Portland’s urban growth boundary, notes that such a premium comes from an underserved market for urban living with adequate city services.

“The prices are spectacular because there isn’t any competition for that type of homes — like the four to eight story buildings on the edge of downtown Portland in a reclaimed brownfield that are going for $300 per square foot. Obviously, it’s an underserved market if they can get away with charging those amounts.”

The good news for smart growth enthusiasts, then, is that much of the demand for new housing in the outer suburbs is driven by factors other than lot size — the search for better schools, the desire to trade up to a larger house, the move away from crime. While it is difficult to create urban environments that meet these market demands — and, as Bier points out, in many cases public policy changes may be needed to create such environments — the research shows that when such environments are created, many buyers flock to them instead of to traditional suburbs.

The bad news for smart growth enthusiasts is that there is still some percentage of buyers who are driven, at least secondarily if not primarily, by a desire for living environments surrounded by wide expanses of open space. Bier’s survey asked movers if they would ever consider returning to Cleveland and to explain why. While many of those who responded “no” cited crime and schools, about 6% responded with reasons like, “We enjoy the peace and quiet of the country too much to ever want to move back to any big city” and “We bought five acres — would never want to be in the city — anywhere. We enjoy nature, trees and animals — would only consider moving to an area that offered the same. Do not like large towns, cities. Houses too close together.”

Six percent may seem like a small number. Actually, it is likely too small an estimate of those who are, like the Edwardses, so attached to “country” living that they would never consider any kind of higher-density housing situation. Even a 6% share of the population who want to above all else live in the countryside on larger lots is problematic for smart growth advocates. As Liberty points out, “mini-estates use up a huge amount of land for a modest amount of population.” Indeed, a recent study on such developments in metropolitan Baltimore found that, in the last ten years, only 20% of new homes were built at the very low density of one home per acre or less. But that relatively small share of homes took up three-quarters of all acreage developed in the region. 

Are Large Lots a Big Problem?

To some degree, then, the greatest challenge for smart growth advocates is figuring out what to do about the significant group of people that really want to live “out in the country”.

Libertarian think tanks like the Reason Public Policy Institute argue that, since only approximately 5% of the nation’s land is developed, accommodating further growth in formerly rural areas should not be a problem.

A closer look at the areas people like the Edwards choose to move to, however, undermines the validity of such an argument.

“We wouldn’t be living here if we weren’t an hour and a half to Los Angeles,” Paul Edwards said. “We still have access and convenience to Los Angeles — the professional services, the friends, the airport.”

“I don’t think that I could ever go back to the city, but I don’t think that I could ever move to North Dakota,” Sarah Edwards added.

But even the amount of land within a reasonable radius of an old core city — the type of land sought by the Edwardses and others — is remarkably large — as longtime planning consultant Ed Risse points out in his 2000 book The Shape of the Future:

“Prior to the railroad, in an hour a person could walk four miles…On horseback, the pace was faster, but not a lot faster for long distances…Rails and steel wheels (and later highways and rubber wheels), increased the one-hour distance yardstick from four miles to fifty miles. While going ten times as far…The total area that is inscribed by a radius of 50 miles is over 150 times as large as one with a four-mile radius.”

What, then, is the case against large lots?

The real concerns fall into two categories. First, such lots greatly increase the fiscal and environmental impact of development because of the roads, school transportation, etc. needed to serve them and the long distances that their owners must drive to get anywhere. The second concern comes from the very notion of people —by and large the wealthy — moving further from the central, older core city, creating jobs that are hard for low-income people to reach, and transforming the countryside from an environmental and recreational asset to all residents of a metropolitan area to a series of private enclaves for the very wealthy.

Are these problems real? Yes. Insoluble? Perhaps not.

Risse, who spent the 1980’s planning large mixed-use developments for legendary developer Til Hazel in the second ring of suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., recently moved his practice to Warrenton, Virginia, 45 miles west of Washington. He argues that sustainable communities (which he calls Alpha Communities) can be created in such formerly rural places, perhaps even more easily than can be done closer to the urban core.

“As you get farther into the countryside,” Risse says, “like gravitational or electromagnetic forces, the economic, social and physical forces [of a core city] diminish. A primary result is that the critical mass of economic and social activity needed to create and sustain balanced Alpha Communities grows smaller.

“The key is creating a balanced component, not an abstract notion that everyone should live in a regional core. Living in the core does not suit some…As long as the citizens of small [settlements in the countryside] pay their fair share of the cost of supporting their urban lifestyle, who is the loser?”

One increasingly popular model of creating balanced communities that satisfies the demands of some to live surrounded by nature is conservation subdivision design (CSD), a development method popularized by Randall Arendt’s book Rural by Design. CSD places individual homes on smaller lots, preserving much of a farm or forest undergoing development as community open space. The subdivision is designed to integrate this space so as to create the feeling of living in the country, in many cases even more dramatically than a standard large-lot subdivision does. Such subdivisions reduce public service and environmental costs because they require shorter lengths of new roads and sewer lines and preserve farm and forest land. CSDs even can, if done in concert with a regional land use and transportation plan, be walkable and transit-accessible and, by including a mix of types of housing units, be affordable to a greater range of the population. Arendt also argues that such subdivisions are more marketable.

“Commuters with full-time jobs have little time to look after much more than a basic three-quarter-acre houselot,” Arendt writes. “The oft-expressed desire ‘to look out my window and not see my neighbor’s house’ reflects a psychological need that is sometimes better satisfied with creative site design and smaller lots.”

If new communities on the urban fringe are built in an environmentally sensitive fashion on smaller lots and provide a range of transportation options and housing types, much of the demand for quasi-rural living can be met without the problems that large lot development traditionally brings. So why doesn’t this type of development happen more often? Archaic zoning laws designed to protect farmland establish minimum lot sizes, which in effect prevents these creative solutions. Arendt suggests instead that maximum lot sizes be established, and that zoning codes require the remaining open space to be preserved in a contiguous fashion that creates a regional greenbelt.

Risse even suggests that many such developments could take place by recycling already developed, but underutilized, land.

“In places like Warrenton-Fauquier [Virginia] there is far more land already urbanized than could be possibly converted into balanced Alpha Communities given market demand,” Risse said.

Smart Growth from a Market Perspective

Despite the frequent (and largely correct) reminders by smart growth proponents that government policy has played a massive role in creating the mess of suburban sprawl, high traffic congestion, and declining quality of life, we still live in a country in which the most powerful force determining residential location decisions is the market. If people had a real choice between smart growth-style development and conventional suburban sprawl, would they choose to live in ‘smarter’ communities?

The answer is a qualified yes. Most people make location decisions largely based on public service issues, followed closely by availability of a sufficiently large house. Neighborhoods designed along smart growth principles can compete on these terms. Indeed, studies show that people are willing to pay a premium for neighborhoods that have an urban feel and provide decent public services, reflecting an underserved market.

A small percentage of the population really wants to live out in the country. Too often, smart growth proponents argue for a pure urban growth boundary to stop people from moving too far out. Such a policy, while proven to have much merit in places like Portland, is probably impracticable given the fragmented local governance that characterizes most of the country. Local governments, developers, and non-profits can create more realistic win-win scenarios through building some Conservation Design Subdivisions that include housing affordable to a mix of incomes and that preserve critical open space, ensuring that people who move out to the country pay for the public costs of their decision, and creating better options for those people who would prefer to live in urban settings but are pushed out to the countryside by poor urban services.

Smart growth can work within the framework of the market, instead of constantly battling against it. But getting to that point requires reform of national, state, and local policies, like zoning and public service cost subsidies, which favor runaway sprawl development over the smart growth development that many buyers prefer. Without such reform, the economics of development will remain tilted, rather perversely, against buyers getting what they want.