From The Anti-planner, September 15:
Transit and the Mania for Density
When I was in high school—this would be about 1969—my social studies teacher asked the class to imagine we could design the city of Portland from scratch. What would it look like? I did a few calculations and realized that, if people were packed into higher densities, most of the city could be left as parks and open space. My vision called for a grid of high-rise clusters with a mixture of retail shops and apartments, accompanied by some single-family homes. Each cluster would be surrounded by forests and parks and connected with the others by rail transit so no one would have to drive. Industrial areas would be located in their own clusters.
It never occurred to me to ask whether people wanted to live in high rises, whether the cost of building housing in high rises would be more than the cost of single-family homes, or whether people would still need cars because they might want to go somewhere not reachable by train. In essence, I had designed the Ideal Communist City as described in a book by that name that was first published in English in 1971. That book was influenced by Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which he proposed in the 1930s. Planning historian Peter Hall called Corbusier “the Rasputin of urban planning” for his authoritarian views and the ways in which he beguiled and misled generations of urban planners.
Urban planners today usually prefer mid-rises to high-rises, but they still have a mania for density. They use urban-growth boundaries and similar policies to prohibit low-density development at the fringes of urban areas in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and other states. They use tax dollars to subsidize the construction of high-density housing projects, particularly along major transit corridors. They seek to abolish single-family zoning so they can increase densities in those neighborhoods as well. Like a naïve high-school student, they never ask whether people want these things or how much they cost.
One of the major goals of increasing urban densities is to increase transit ridership, and transit agencies have become complicit in the density mania. They use funds from the Federal Transit Administration and other sources to subsidize so-called transit-oriented developments, which are high-density housing projects that are often mixed in with retail spaces.
Yet there is little evidence that these policies work. Between 1980 and 2018, the population density of the San Francisco-Oakland urban area increased by 41 percent and the region saw the construction of numerous transit-oriented developments. Yet per capita transit ridership fell by more than a third. In the same period, Los Angeles increased its density by 32 percent, yet per capita ridership fell by 9 percent. In fact, there is little correlation between changes in urban population densities and changes in either per capita ridership or transit’s share of commuting.
The Mythical World of TODs
When Portland’s urban-growth boundary was first drawn in the 1980s, Oregon required the region to do a housing market analysis every five years and expand the boundary to meet at least 20 years-worth of anticipated growth. But in 1993, Metro—Portland’s regional planning agency—persuaded the legislature to allow it to instead meet future housing needs by rezoning neighborhoods inside the boundary to higher densities....
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Follow the link for Transit Oriented Development or take a look at his Ideal Communist City:
Smart Growth and the Ideal City
May 6, 2005
American suburbs are "a chaotic and depressing agglomeration of buildings covering enormous stretches of land." The cost of providing services to such "monotonous stretches of individual low-rise houses" is too high. As a result, "the search for a future kind of residential building leads logically to" high-density, mixed-use housing.
This sounds like typical writings of New Urbanist or smart-growth planners. In fact, these words were written nearly forty years ago by University of Moscow planners in a book titled The Ideal Communist City. The principles in their book formed a blueprint for residential construction all across Russia and eastern Europe. With a couple of minor changes, they could also be the blueprint for smart growth.
Mixed-use developments, wrote the Moscow planners, allow people easy access to "public functions and services" such as day care, restaurants, parks, and laundry facilities. This, in turn, would minimize the need for private spaces, and the authors suggest that apartments for a family of four need be no larger than about 600 square feet. Prior to the late 1960s, such apartments were built in five- to six-story brick buildings, but the authors looked forward to new, reinforced-concrete building techniques that would allow fifteen- to seventeen-story apartment buildings.
Like the New Urbanists, the soviet planners saw several advantages to such high-density housing. First, it would be more equitable, since everyone from factory managers to lowly janitors would live in the same buildings. While New Urbanists are less concerned about housing everyone in nearly identical apartments, they do promote the idea of mixed-income communities so that the wealthy can rub shoulders with lower-income people.
Second, the soviets believed apartments would promote a sense of community and collective values. Single-family homes were too "autonomous," they said, while the apartment "becomes the primary element in a collective system of housing." Similarly, many New Urbanists claim that their designs will produce a greater sense of community.
Third, high-density housing was supposed to allow easy access to public transportation. "Private individual transportation has produced such an overwhelming set of unresolved problems in cities that even planners in bourgeois societies are inclined to limit it," the Russians prophetically observed. With their high-density apartments, as many as 12,000 people could live within 400-yard walking distances of public transit stations. That's about 70,000 people per square mile, slightly greater than the density of Manhattan. "The economic advantages of (public transit) for getting commuters to and from production areas are obvious," says the book, "and it is also an answer to congestion in the central city."
Urban Planning, East German-Style Soviet-block countries were building such new cities even as the University of Moscow planners were writing their book. In 1970, East Germany developed a standard building plan known as the WBS 70 (WBS stands for Wohnungsbausystem, literally, "house building system") that was applied to nearly 650,000 apartments in East Berlin and other East German cities. "The WBS 70 was the uniform basis of the accelerated housing construction until the end of the GDR," says a paper titled Architecture as Ideology. According to page 23 of this paper, the WBS 70 offered a generous 700 square feet in its three-room apartments, not counting 75 square feet of private balcony....
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