Trying To Find The Core: Hard To Get A Beat On

Evolution of the suburban core: Proximity to the ‘good stuff’

By Peter Madrid | MadridMedia
Posted on September 23, 2016 by ULI Arizona
Blogger Note: There's a much better article about sprawls and suburbs later on in this post
Your MesaZona blogger was somewhat surprised to find Peter Madrid, who's a heavyweight in the commercial real estate market, now making a joint-career in journalism.
Instead of biting into the harvest from "The Tree of Knowledge" growing out of a wealth of brilliant thinking for new development models, whatever the author calls "the core" in either urban or suburban environments appears to be surrounded by a bunch of confusion:    

"It’s hard to get a beat on what’s happening in America’s suburbs as trends point to people moving back to the city, particularly the urban cores.
"However, according to panelists at ULI Arizona’s Main Program, “Evolution of the Suburban Core,” people aren’t ready to give up on the suburbs, a big house, and the yard.
( Peter Madrid, shown in the image to the right from Phoenix Business Journal, Aug 1, 2016 )

He goes on not saying that most people think of suburbs as sprawls - they have no core with human populations expanding away from central urban areas into low-density, monofunctional and usually car-dependent communities ...yet he goes onto to write:
"The suburbs are alive and well. At their core, they’re centers of change, cultural activity, and economic growth. The case studies presented prove that point right here in the Valley.

Read more of the article if you can believe what Peter Madrid or any of the panelists had to say
http://arizona.uli.org/uli-arizona-news/evolution-suburban-core/?




Why Sprawl Is Not the Only Choice

By Matthew Robare • September 22, 2016, 2:20 PM

Everyone who follows debates about urban planning already knows that sprawling cities build more housing and have lower housing costs. Yet last week Issi Romem, an economic analyst at BuildZoom, a company that helps people find and hire contractors, published an analysis of this phenomenon that sent urbanists reeling. It should not have done so. Romem’s data was not new and his analysis was flawed and misleading.

Here are some of the points

• While Romem’s data is indisputable, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
• Sprawl isn’t really as cheap as it seems. A network of tax breaks, financial guarantees, subsidies, and other chicanery keep parts of suburbia relatively inexpensive.
• Most notably, transportation costs are often excluded from the discussion of housing affordability, even though it’s hard to live anywhere without a way to get to work
• This leads to what Romem calls the “land-use trilemma,” which presents the perceived trade-offs between more sprawl, doing nothing while letting expensive cities get more expensive, or liberalizing land use laws to allow more density. Much like C.S. Lewis’s trilemma, which was useful for Christian apologetics (but is usually ignored by more serious theologians and Biblical scholars), Romem’s trilemma is useful for the apologists of sprawl but falls apart upon examining his assumptions.
• For instance, tucked away in a footnote, Romem writes that “Shifting from single family to multifamily housing involves a sacrifice in terms of living standards

• A similar view of development underlines and undermines the trilemma. For example, Romem implies that development is a major intervention that happens on a neighborhood scale. He told Bloomberg‘s Patrick Clark, “No one is really thinking about tearing down single-family neighborhoods and putting up apartment buildings.”But no urbanists really think that kind of demolition is necessary. There’s a wide spectrum between the Levittowns, archetypes of postwar sprawl, and Hong Kong’s former Kowloon Walled City, once the densest neighborhood on the planet. Density can be added, as in the albeit extreme Mission bunkhouse example, by turning a single family house into a multifamily
• New Urbanism also presents an alternative to the trilemma by supporting the regeneration of small towns affected by deindustrialization. Many cities have older, traditional small towns with existing but dilapidated multifamily housing stock or downtown commercial or industrial blocks capable of being attractively renovated
• New Urbanist designs can also be applied to new development in expansive cities. Some big cities, especially outside the northeast and west coast, are surrounded by unincorporated land not subject to municipal zoning laws. A developer could build a denser, more urban neighborhood in these areas—which is exactly what’s happening in Toronto’s suburbs, according to Stephen J. Smith. The financing might be difficult, thanks to federal rules that, according to the Regional Plan Association, discourage the construction of small mixed-use buildings by capping how much commercial space they can have and promoting larger buildings.

Just as importantly, the land-use trilemma falls apart because realistically there is no alternative to allowing greater density.
There are hard limits to the development pattern of American suburbia.
The most discussed is commute time across metropolitan areas. According to Slate, longer commutes are associated with divorce, isolation, obesity, stress, neck and back pain, sleeplessness, and unhappiness.

Metropolitan areas need not follow the standard pattern of a dense core—not that most American cities are dense by global standards—and dispersed suburbs, but could become more decentralized with pockets of higher density at certain points throughout a region, along the lines of Joel Garreau’s neglected “edge city” concept.