Tag Archives: urban sprawl

cars vs. meat

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This study attempts to find a hypothetical case where a person who bikes to work has a higher carbon footprint than a person who drives to work. I’m drastically oversimplifying, I’m sure, but what I gather is that if a vegetarian with a very fuel efficient car lived the same distance from work as a person who eats a huge amount of meat but bikes to work, the person who bikes to work could have a slightly higher carbon footprint. It is surprising, but I don’t think the right way to spin it is to say biking is bad. For one thing, people who bike to work are going to live much, much closer to work on average than people who drive to work. I also bet people who drive a lot eat more meat, on average, than people who don’t. Because steak and SUVs just go together. But I think the right take home message is that driving and meat are both pretty bad, environmentally speaking. If you want to help the environment, these are probably the two things you can limit or give up that will do the most good.

Pennsylvania governor on anti-city policies

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Here is the Pennsylvania governor talking about how state policy disadvantages cities and what could be done about it.

  • Regional land use planning
  • Zoning ordinances and planning codes that allow mixed use, high density communities
  • Urban growth boundaries like Portland, Oregon
  • Inclusive zoning like Montgomery County, Maryland
  • Change public infrastructure investment strategy to promote redevelopment of old settlements
  • Strike a better balance between highway and mass transit funding
  • Consolidate and restore old industrial sites for redevelopment
  • Reform local tax policies starting with the state taking a bigger share of funding for public education

In the end, the struggle for our cities will depend on the outcome of the competition between suburbs and cities. The outcome will largely be determined by the extent to which that competition is a fair one.

I like most of this, but I’m not so sure about the city vs. suburb talk. Part of regional coordination and planning would be to think of the success of a metro area as a whole, from its most intensely urbanized core out to the less dense areas. But I like the urban growth boundary concept, because it puts a lower limit on how far out that development can go and how much infrastructure it can gobble up to get services to people who are spread out, at every else’s expense. Education funding could be done well at this metro area scale, rather than pitting many tiny municipalities and school districts against each other as it does now (a problem across the U.S., but Pennsylvania is particularly bad). I am skeptical of the state, which draws much of its political power from the empty spaces between metro areas, being the solution. Its existence depends on sucking resources out of the population centers where economic activity happens and taxes get paid, and redistributing them to the empty spaces. Even more insidious, in our state at least racism plays a role in the urban vs. rural divide, as well as the city center vs. suburban divide.

Pennsylvania is #1…

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…in government fragmentation, according to this 2003 paper by David Rusk at the Brookings Institution.

  • The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has created the nation’s most fragmented system of local government within its metropolitan areas.
  • State policies have contributed to uncontrolled urban sprawl by making its “little boxes” governments so highly dependent on local property taxes, promoting a constant ratables chase. Over the last fifty years Pennsylvania ranks second only to West Virginia in consuming the most land for the least population growth.
  • The combination – constant outward development overlaying a pattern of immutable local government boundaries – has condemned Pennsylvania’s “inelastic” central cities, most boroughs, and many “built-out” townships to population, economic, and fiscal decline.
  • The many governmental “little boxes” actively contribute to the high degree of racial and economic segregation that characterizes Pennsylvania’s metropolitan areas.
  • Whether through costly inefficiencies, high social and economic disparities, or cutthroat inter-municipal competition, Pennsylvania’s governmental system of “little boxes” also retards its economic growth.
  • Sprawl and steady abandonment of “inelastic” central cities, most boroughs, and many “built-out” townships also implicitly means abandonment (or certainly underutilization) of existing physical infrastructure (houses, stores, factories, water and sewer lines, etc.) that cost prior generations a fortune to create originally and is even more expensive to duplicate anew. Discarding this investment is decidedly fiscally wasteful.

The obvious answer would be to reorganize around metropolitan areas. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council is one model of a regional government with real teeth. I am not an expert on state constitutional law, but it may be that Pennsylvania’s “home rule” state constitution makes it difficult to do something similar. Or it may be that the system of representative government gives outsize power to representatives from relatively less populous places, so the state legislature is unlikely to overhaul things even if the constitution would allow it. Even if these problems could be solved at the state level, the Philadelphia metro area would still cover parts of New Jersey and Delaware. So the remaining option is massive changes to the United States Constitution abolishing states entirely in favor of metropolitan areas. I haven’t noticed that in any campaign platforms lately.