New Urbanism, Why It's Necessary

In my last post, I made note of the issues surrounding New Urbanist design, and described how suburbs cannot truly be considered “New Urbanism”. This is the second post in the series focusing on the New Urbanist movement, in which I will be discussing presentation of the issue.

Since it's formalization in the 1980s, New Urbanism has been promoted mainly in conjunction with environmentalism, and has been talked about in terms of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

This is all well and good, but the association of New Urbanism with environmentalism has created tension among political groups, with New Urbanism being seen as primarily a monolithic (liberal) effort, even though it has benefits far beyond what one political ideology is willing to promote.

Let's start with examining the economic aspects and realities:

1) Cities are the primary economic engines of a region and are responsible for most economic growth. This is because cities serve as markets and exchanges to goods produced elsewhere, this, as well as logistical ease, make cities natural locations for large and small businesses.

2) Density costs less. Suburbs require extra investment in utilities, roads, and land due to the fact that there are a low number of houses built per acre of land that is used. This in turn leads to an extra investment in schools, police stations, fire trucks, school buses, police cars, ambulances, hospitals and clinics which must be built and acquired to serve a decentralized community.

3) Private banks and the Federal Government are primarily responsible for urban sprawl. During the 1930s the Federal Housing Administration was created to promote home ownership by financing and insuring mortgages at low rates. Private banks aided this by blacklisting many urban areas (such as the South Bronx in New York City) so they could not receive loans to improve property. These actions created a housing bubble which resulted in an oversupply of suburban houses as well as a large amount of sub-prime mortgages granted to people at high risk for default. Those two factors combined to create the economic nuclear that which recently happened.

4) The dominance of the housing and automobile industries have essentially put the United States' economic eggs in one basket. The size of these industries coupled with their large workforces led them to be considered by many as “too big to fail”, meaning that facing reality was all that more difficult. In order to build a rigorous and fail-safe economic engine, a variety of equally viable industries and workforces must be created to insure that if one collapses, the entire economic system does not shut down.

And now some social perspectives:

1) Automobile commuting causes stress and is detrimental to mental health. The majority of commuting in the United States is done by car, be it from suburb to suburb or from suburb to inner-city. Excessive stress can degrade physical health, impact decision making, reduce workplace productivity, increase suicidal thoughts (this is starting to sound like a drug commercial), cause insomnia, and cause depression. Suffice to say, stress is bad and should be minimized.

2) The phrases “ethnic minority” and “low economic status” are nearly synonymous with one another. Even before the creation of automobile dependent suburbs, ethnic minorities and religious groups were barred from many new housing developments and the United States was divided along religious and ethnic lines. This trend continued, abet on a reduced scale after World War Two. African Americans in particular were still prohibited from moving into middle class suburban areas, even though some had the financial means to do it (a good example of this is illustrated in A Raisin in the Sun). Urban areas decayed as the white middle class tax base left, leaving ethnic minorities to fend for themselves and go on to suffer the ravages of urban renewal.

3) Ethnic minorities continue to be marginalized through no fault of their own. Because of the removal of the tax base and a re-location of services to the suburbs, most inner-cities now feature deprived schools, inadequate police protection, mediocre housing, and a lack of job opportunities.

4) New Urbanism (when used properly) can dramatically lower crime. Targeted economic development can fix the job, housing, and service crises that plague inner-cities, and can thus cut down dramatically on the opportunities for crime, as it can provide jobs, education, and a sense of community where there was none before.

5) We don't really have a choice. Unless we want to have another housing crisis in the next twenty years, we need to dramatically change the way we design our environments and how we structure our lives, not to mention preventing urban crime and gangs and protecting out economic assets.

These are the kind of arguments that need to be made and debates that need to be had in order to fix the problem of urban sprawl. If we want to build a society that is economically, socially, and yes, environmentally sustainable, we need to look at the big picture and tackle it from all sides.