Streetsblog Capitol Hill

If you think the United States is doing a bad job shifting toward sustainable transportation, take a look at the developing world. The places with the most to lose from auto-oriented development are doubling down on it — to the enormous detriment of their citizens, especially the poorest.

The number of cars in the world is expect to grow as much as 375 percent by 2050. Road fatalities in low- and middle-income countries are expected to rise by 80 percent just over the next eight years, with pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable users making up about half those deaths. Harmful air pollutants that already cause 1.3 million premature deaths each year, mostly in developing and middle-income countries, will rise. And carbon dioxide emissions from transport could grow 300 percent over 2005 levels by 2050 — with most of the growth, again, coming from the developing world.

Michael Replogle and Colin Hughes warn of these dire outcomes in their article on sustainable transportation for the 2012 State of the World report, published by the Worldwatch Institute. While international climate change agreements have historically overlooked the transportation sector, the authors note some promising changes afoot as international development banks seek to add transit projects to their portfolios.

Replogle and Hughes frame transportation policy in terms of both sustainability and equity. The urban poor lose out disproportionately when car-oriented infrastructure dominates, they note, since the lack of affordable transportation forces them “to choose between low incomes in informal sector employment close to affordable housing and higher-wage jobs that force them to spend a large share of their income and hours each day commuting.”

Compounding the inequity, fossil fuel subsidies disproportionately allocate public funds to the wealthy, the authors report: “The International Energy Agency estimates that only eight percent of the $409 billion that the world spent in 2010 to subsidize fossil fuel consumption (about half of which is used for transport) went to the poorest 20 percent of the population.”

Unfortunately, say Replogle and Hughes, international agreements on poverty reduction and climate change have largely ignored transportation. Even the Agenda 21 agreement, a bogeyman among far-right cranks, included “no targets, goals, commitments, or other forms of accountability” for sustainable transport.

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Twenty-eight miles southeast of Cleveland, there is a development that bills itself as “Ohio’s FIRST Green Certified Residential Community.” According to the developer, The Lakes of Orange “offers a rare, one-of-kind opportunity to build and live in a green and sustainable environment.”

“Reserve your place in eco-history today,” its website implores. “We are accepting lot reservations now; lot sizes range from ¼ acre to ¾ acre.”

“Eco-friendly developments” whose marketing materials read like a contradiction in terms — they can be found on the outskirts of almost every metro area. Check out the Saxony in the distant Indianapolis ‘burbs — a “new urban” development advertising both its walkability and “ample parking.” Or how about The Bridgelands in Texas, which says it plans to build a “bustling town center, right next to the proposed Grand Parkway” — the mega-highway project it is depending on to lure residents from Houston, 30 miles away.

I guess it’s hard to blame developers. As mounting evidence shows Americans are beginning to favor more walkable urban environments, the motivation to greenwash sprawl is clear.

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Walkable development pays — that’s the conclusion of a study recently outlined in Planetizen. For cities and towns facing tight budgets — just about everywhere in the United States right now — the smart way to boost tax revenue is to encourage mixed-use, walkable development, as the above graphic amply illustrates.

The for-profit development company Public Interest Projects (PIP) reports that urbanism produces much more tax revenue for localities than sprawl. Analyzing tax data around Asheville, North Carolina, the research team found that downtowns — places with the most places to shop per acre — often subsidize the more suburban parts of the community. In places like Asheville, mixed-use developments offered up to eight times (or more) the tax revenue per acre of a Super Walmart.

Former PIP employee Joseph Minicozzi, now a principal with for-profit development firm Urban3, tells Planetizen readers that many cities are approaching development from the wrong frame of mind (emphasis added):

Our mistake has been looking at the overall value of a development project rather than its per unit productivity. Especially relevant in these times of limited public means, every city should be thinking long and hard about encouraging, and not accidentally discouraging, the property tax bonus that comes with mixed-use urbanism. Put simply, density gets far more bang for its buck.

He concludes that public policies that encourage low-density development urgently need to be reformed:

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There are plenty of hidden costs to auto-oriented development: increased levels of air and water pollution, safety risks posed to pedestrians and cyclists. But as Strong Towns Blog points out, some costs are hardly hidden at all.

The authors of the comprehensive plan for Brainerd, Minnesota (pop: 13,590) probably thought they had a great idea: Take the properties along busy Highway 210 in the east part of town, an assortment of run-down or vacant storefronts, and encourage their replacement by “highway-oriented businesses.” The plan bases this strategy on the idea that “having a strong highway commercial area… provides for a healthy downtown.”

“The problem,” writes Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, “is that ‘strong’ and ‘highway commercial’ are – in almost all cases – mutually exclusive terms.” Furthermore, the “fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations and other auto-oriented businesses“ promoted by the comprehensive plan are actually worth less to the city than the marginal establishments that are there already.

Marohn compares the “old and blighted” development on one block — the kind of development the town would like to get rid of — to the “shiny and new” development down the street, a fast food joint with lots of surface parking:

The eleven old and blighted lots [above left] — some of the most undesirable commercial property in the city — arranged in the traditional development pattern along the incompatible, major arterial of Highway 210 have a combined tax base of $1,136,500.

To compare, the Taco John’s property [above right] — the one that is not only shiny and new but configured precisely as the city of Brainerd desires the old and blighted properties to someday be — has a total valuation of only $803,200.

At its nastiest and most decrepit, fighting the negative auto traffic speeding by and the absence of pedestrian connectivity, lacking all natural advantage from the neighboring land uses that would ideally accompany a traditional neighborhood design, the old and blighted traditional commercial block still outperforms the new, auto-oriented development by 41%. [emphasis his]

The city is shrinking its own tax base by encouraging businesses to turn their backs on traditional Main Streets in favor of busy arterial highways. A cheaper way to maximize these parcels’ value, according to Marohn, would be to restore connectivity to the nearby residential area.

If the U.S. had a national transportation policy, this story of corruption and waste never would have happened.

But an enduring feature of the current policy predicament is that once federal funding is in the hands of state DOTs, they more or less have a blank check, and the merit of any given transportation project often matters less than who’s boosting it. In no state is this more apparent than Texas. And no Texas transportation project has been bought-and-paid-for so unabashedly as the Grand Parkway.

The Grand Parkway is Houston’s $5.2 billion, 180-mile third outerbelt. This September, Texas DOT broke ground on the newest segment of the highway, funded in part with money from the 2009 stimulus package. Constructed piecemeal over decades through largely undeveloped land outside one of the nation’s fastest growing cities, the Grand Parkway is a pointed demonstration of how a state can fritter away billions in federal transportation funds for the benefit of a small group of well-connected people.

In April, when Streetsblog interviewed Billy Burge, head of the pro-highway, non-profit Grand Parkway Association, he conceded that the outerbelt’s latest expansion — Segment E, through the Katy Prairie — wasn’t even intended to handle increased traffic. He was pretty clear that the project was about enabling the development of rural land into large-lot, detached single-family homes. “You can call it sprawl, or you can call it quality of life,” he said.

But Burge didn’t mention that before becoming head of the Grand Parkway Association, he had cashed in on that growth as a developer. Or that, thanks to a special Texas regulation, the Grand Parkway Association had been granted quasi-governmental powers. That’s just how it goes in Texas, where the businessmen fund the politicians, the politicians appoint the businessmen to public office, and the office holders funnel taxpayer funds to projects that enrich their business interests.

The Grand Parkway was first conceived as a futuristic, pie-in-the-sky, long-term vision in the 1960s, when magic highway delusions reached their apex in America. But the plan was largely forgotten by the time Billy Burge Jr. and Bob Lanier, both major landowners along the corridor, teamed up to resurrect it in 1984.

At the time, Lanier, who would go on to become Houston’s mayor, owned 1,700 acres along the proposed Parkway. He was also the head of the Texas State Highway Commission, the five-member decision making arm of Texas DOT.

Burge was serving as the head of Metro, Houston’s transit authority. He was also the developer of Cinco Ranch, a five-square-mile master-planned community that is now home to 11,000 people. The first segment of the Grand Parkway directly bisected Burge’s development.

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Robert Peck says he’ll gladly pay more to locate office buildings near transit – the time saved commuting makes it worthwhile.

Peck isn’t any old office manager. He’s the commissioner of the GSA Public Buildings Service, also known as “the landlord for the civilian federal government.” He’s in charge of acquiring office space for all federal departments and agencies.

So if he’s paying attention to transit access, it has enormous effects. In the Washington area, especially, the federal government is a big enough tenant that developers compete against each other to build according to federal specifications. As part of Executive Order 13514 [PDF], a 2009 Obama administration initiative that mandated federal agencies to pay more attention to reducing their carbon footprint, those specifications now include transit access and mixed uses.

Specifically, the measure calls on federal agencies to ensure “that planning for new Federal facilities or new leases includes consideration of sites that are pedestrian friendly, near existing employment centers, and accessible to public transit, and emphasizes existing central cities and, in rural communities, existing or planned town centers.”

Under Peck, the GSA looked at how space is utilized in white-collar office locations. They found that on any given day, about a third of the employees don’t report to work – they’re either traveling on business, on vacation, away at meetings, or home sick – and then another third are around but aren’t sitting at their desk at any given moment.

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What happened to the United States over the past several years is most commonly described as a recession. By the technical definition of the word we’re two years into a recovery. But it sure doesn’t seem that way.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of intellectual leaders says the country is experiencing something different than a normal cyclical fluctuation: the end of an epoch.

Leading urban thinkers, from Richard Florida to James Howard Kunstler, believe we have reached the limits of our fossil-fueled, double-mortgaged, McMansion-based economy. Relief won’t come, they say, until America begins confronting the systemic problems that produced the meltdown, including inefficient and unsustainable public infrastructure investments and housing development.

“What were seeing right now is an inability to look at how we live and how it relates to our problems, and financial problems,” said Kunstler Tuesday during a speaking engagement with the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Production homebuilders, mortgage lenders, real estate agents, they are all sitting back now waiting for the, quote, bottom of the housing market to come with the expectation that things will go back to the way they were in 2005.”

But despite massive government expenditures to restart the old economic engine driven by suburban homebuilding, recovery is elusive, Kunstler said. The author of “The Geography of Nowhere” and “The Long Emergency” argues that suburbanization has been a multi-decade American experiment, and a failed one.

Kunstler is joined in that perspective by Charles Marohn, the director of non-profit group Strong Towns. A new report from Strong Towns places blame for the lagging economy directly on policies that favor low-density housing, fossil-fuel dependence and publicly-subsidized overbuilt infrastructure.

In its new booklet Curbside Chat, Strong Towns asserts that since the 1970s, the suburban growth that powered America’s economy operated much like a Ponzi scheme. In towns across the country, politicians traded the short-term payoffs of sprawling development — namely increased taxes — for long-term maintenance obligations that are just now coming due. And they’re coming up short.

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With financial reform nearly complete, the Senate Banking Committee turned its attention today to one of Senator Chris Dodd's (D-CT) next priorities, the Livable Communities Act. Local government came out strong for the initiative to promote sustainable and integrated regional planning, with representatives of the nation's cities, towns, counties, and regional planning organizations testifying in favor. Among committee members, concerns persisted about whether the bill would disadvantage rural areas. 

The Livable Communities Act would provide about $4 billion in competitive grants to coordinate housing, transportation, and economic development policy with an eye toward promoting sustainable development. About $400 million would be slated for planning with the remainder funding implementation. The bill would also create a new office within the Department of Housing and Urban Development to guide and administer the programs. If passed, it would strengthen the Obama administration's multi-agency Sustainable Communities Initiative. 

At today's committee hearing representatives of the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience -- from trying to revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth of a rural Maryland county -- to explain how federal policy could spur better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the executive director for the region's Council of Governments, but they haven't been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated transportation and land use planning can help address a host of challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency, deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren't urban or rural. "One community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether his rural state would benefit under Dodd's legislation.

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Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan said late Friday that his agency will soon start gauging the "location efficiency" of its grant applicants, determining each project's potential for connecting residents to surrounding neighborhoods -- and mirroring the recommendations of a recent report that found a correlation between homeowners' foreclosure risk and their dependence on car ownership.

Donovan's announcement came during an address to the Congress for the New Urbanism's (CNU) annual meeting in Atlanta. During his visit, the former New York City housing commissioner also toured the BeltLine project, an ambitious local effort to convert former rail track into new light rail and trails.

In his remarks to the CNU, Donovan depicted the integration of "location efficiency" measures as a way to encourage housing developers to pursue more mixed-use, denser construction.

"[I]t’s time that federal dollars stopped encouraging sprawl and started lowering the barriers to the kind of sustainable development our country needs and our communities want," Donovan said. "And with $3.25 billion at stake in these competitions, that’s exactly what they will start to do."

Evaluating the range of transport options available for prospective residents of urban and suburban areas was among the central recommendations of a foreclosures report released in January by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). That study was aimed at mortgage lenders rather than the government, but Democratic lawmakers last year began pushing for HUD to insure more mortgages based on the properties' "location efficiency."

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The federal government has long taken heat for giving short shrift to cities, and the Obama administration -- which recently lost its urban affairs chief after months of lackluster progress -- is no exception.

But two projects getting underway in the U.S. capital provide evidence that, slowly but surely, federal funding is making its way to the type of dense urban developments that are becoming more in-demand as the suburbs languish.

The Washington City Paper's Lydia DePillis first flagged the two housing efforts on Friday afternoon:

Last October, the Obama administration announced that it would be helping out state housing finance agencies with their liquidity problems ... Last month, D.C. became the first housing finance agency in the country to close a multi-deal transaction using the federal dollars, patching together $55.8 million in construction costs for three rental buildings in the district.

The 52-unit Webster Gardens, which was built in 1921 as the first garden-style apartment building in the city, will now be the first building in the city — and therefore the country! — to move forward using money that started with legislation all the way back in 2008.

DePillis also highlighted the Sheridan Station housing development, where D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty was slated to participate in a groundbreaking ceremony this morning.

The Sheridan project received $5.8 million in stimulus money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last year, which will go towards constructing an energy-efficient replacement for torn-down public housing units in the city's economically struggling Ward 8. More than one-third of residents in the ward are living below the poverty line, according to the most recent available Census data.