The other day I lamented that the nation’s population and economic center of gravity seems to be moving toward less walkable and sustainable areas. So if people and companies are voting that way through their market transactions, what do we make of a survey where a majority of people self-report that they do in fact want to live in walkable communities, and real estate markets tend to reflect this. It’s a logic puzzle, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First of all, when people are polled on what they want in a house and a community, they also say they want ample free parking. It sounds great to have ample free parking AND walkability, but the laws of geometry simply don’t allow this. This is because most cars are sitting still most of the time, you need large amounts of parking to accommodate peak demand (for example, a mall during holiday shopping season), and cars need a lot of room to maneuver in addition to the space they take up when they are parked or trying to get from point A to point B. People do not understand this – when everybody has a car, the space required to accommodate the cars requires things to get too far apart to also have walkability. People walk less and less gets spent on walking infrastructure, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Geometrically speaking, the only ways to solve this conundrum might be alternative vehicles such as bicycles and golf carts which don’t need so much room to maneuver and can be parked very efficiently. The problem is, these vehicles are not safe to be in around high-speed highway vehicles and trucks. So all these forms of transport really need their own lanes and signals to make it work. This is way too much change and perceived expense for America’s can’t-do urban planning crowd. And the public tends to turn on anything they see as infringing their freedom to drive fast and park anywhere they want for free. No matter what they say in a survey.

Linear cities might theoretically work. This seems very science-fiction, but you could maybe have a nice skinny walkable city with a sea of parking lots on one side of it, so everybody is within easy walking distance of everything they need including their car. But in this case, the only reason to own a car would be to go on an inter-city trip, and rail or buses would make more sense. If anyone knows of a previously undeveloped continent where this can be tried, let me know.

Gentrification, perceived and/or actual, is another issue. What I see in Philadelphia is that clean, safe, walkable, green neighborhoods with good schools are in very short supply. Prices get bid up for things that are in short supply, so wealthier people live in these areas. Wealthier people are also more vocal about demanding infrastructure and services from their government. So they demand, and they get. Meanwhile, less well-to-do neighborhoods notice all this, and they complain. The government can’t or won’t spend the money to provide excellent services and infrastructure to all neighborhoods, so a very convenient and cheap solution is to provide them to nobody. The only beneficiaries are slum lords and owners of nuisance businesses like junkyards and building material warehouses in the middle of residential neighborhoods (yes, I have somewhere very specific in mind when I bring this up), some of whom are politicians or in bed with politicians. This is all a downward spiral.

According to this article in Governing, some economists question whether population growth is always a good thing for cities.

Although the preponderance of media opinion has always been that more people make a better city, there has long existed a cluster of academics who challenge that wisdom. Perhaps the leading voice in this contrarian club is Paul Gottlieb, an economist at Rutgers University. He has argued for decades not only that local elected officials should take a measured approach to growth, but that metropolitan areas with stable or slow-growing populations are likely to have greater economic prosperity. Fifteen years ago, in a paper titled “Growth Without Growth,” Gottlieb called attention to 23 of the largest 100 metro areas, which he nicknamed “wealth builders.” Those were places with below-average increases in population and above-average increases in per capita income.

Another group of metro areas, which Gottlieb labeled “population magnets,” had excelled at gaining residents but performed below average at increasing per capita income. The data seemed to suggest that mayors shouldn’t frame future population increase as a guaranteed path to a better economy, especially when it comes at the cost of greater congestion, pollution and the loss of open space. “My paper was controversial in the sense that it questioned the desirability of population growth in any way,” Gottlieb says now. “It’s not obvious why you would want population growth except as a means to the end of increased income or increased wealth.”

It seems to me that bringing in more affluent taxpayers has to be good for a city as a whole, particularly legacy cities that have lost population density and have vacant, undermaintained housing and infrastructure. Of course it is not good for some residents in some neighborhoods if they feel as though the newcomers are concentrating and displacing them. I don’t have the answer to this any more than anyway else, except that providing excellent transportation and other infrastructure might tend to encourage people and well-paying jobs to spread out a bit more geographically. In Philadelphia, what is happening is that the newer, more affluent taxpayers are concentrating in neighborhoods closest to the central business district where they work, so they can walk, bike, or have a reasonable commute on public transportation to work. There will not be any lack of housing in Philadelphia as a whole any time soon, but the less affluent are getting pushed farther out from the city center and neighborhoods with good transportation links to the city center. Philadelphia actually made a plan for a comprehensive subway system a hundred years ago, built a small fraction of it, then stopped. Nobody has the imagination to even suggest finishing that system. We don’t even have the imagination to consider taking diesel buses offline in favor of the electric buses and trolleys we used to have, even as we have a serious air pollution problem. Schools and parks that have been in a state of disrepair for decades are very gradually improving in the more affluent neighborhoods, and continuing to languish in the less affluent ones. All this leads to tension between black and white, rich and poor, recent arrivals and long-time residents. Increased tax revenues could be invested to help solve these problems, but our politicians and bureaucrats just continue to fail us.