Joel Kotkin has basically been writing the same column over and over. Probably because it remains relevant.
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The people designing your cities don’t care what you want. They’re planning for hipsters.
It’s a crucial question, but one rarely asked by the pundits and developers who dominate the debate over the future of the American city.
Their current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. It’s city as adult Disneyland or “entertainment machine,” chock-a-block with chic restaurants, shops and festivals.
Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.
Kotkin has a valid criticism of many urban planning policies, but his article paints the world as too black and white.
Believe it or not, it is possible to have coffee shops and restaurants and microbreweries, AND playgrounds and schools and community centres and, and, and…. all in livable cities.
Yes, we sometimes get carried away fetishising the hipster amenities, but these are not mutually exclusive from middle-class-family amenities.
And let’s not forget that the vast majority of development in many (most?) North American cities is still suburban sprawl. So the “hipster urbanists” may be making the headlines, but by and large we’re still sprawling outwards in the planning paradigm of the 1960s.
Reminds me of the Yogi Berra quote “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Sprawl ? You mean leafy desirable neighborhoods with desirable single family homes and yards ?
Urban planning needs to allow for ALL housetypes: mansions, mere high end single family homes, duplexes, 4-plexes, apartment buildings, high rises, mixed use buildings, parks, industrial areas, commercial shopping centers etc.
A diverse society needs diverse housing options. One size does not fit all.
So urban planning in downtown Vancouver is different than in Surrey than in Langley. Obviously a horse farm in downtown Vancouver makes no sense but a sub-division catering to horse owners with 2-5 acres parcels in rural Langley may.
Clearly, road and infrastructure (sewer, schools, water, gas, fire, police, ..) pricing might be mispriced by cities, and as such off-site levies for provisioning of such services to suburbs may have to be far higher than today, up from a low of $20,000 in some communities to maybe $100,000 for a single family lot, maybe even higher.
I mean sprawl. It’s a well defined term.
Yes, well defined and usually implying s.th. negative. I disagree. Some sprawl is desired, especially for families who want a yard and some distance to their neighbors. The pricing of “sprawl” of course is another issue as indeed too many roads are built or not paid for by the actual user of these roads or other infrastructure.
Is the the ideal city, the most efficient a 10,000 story tower, the rest parkland, from a planning point of view ?
How does teh “ideal” city look like anyway ?
Sprawl is negative, yes. It’s expensive and destructive, to our environment and to our health.
Yards do not require sprawl.
If you want “some distance” to your neighbour, move to the country.
The ideal city contains a mixture of built forms and development patterns. Sprawl should not be one of them, just like a 10,000-storey tower should not be one of them (thanks for the straw-man argument).
Agustin, what are suburbs but the middle class way of all getting a place in the country?
Bob, please do not conflate suburbs with sprawl. If suburbs are done right, they need not be sprawl.
Sprawl means auto-dependent, residential-only areas.
Suburban just means lower density than the city core. If they’re planned right, suburbs can be served by public transit, walking, and biking; and have commercial and residential areas in close proximity.
Sprawl is suburbs done wrong.
I enjoyed Kotkin’s book “The City” because it highlighted the ceremonial aspect of the city. What he might now call the “entertainment machine”. But reading his articles is to be disappointed: straw men arguments, Obama-derangement-syndrome, Randall O’Toole worship. Here we have the classic straw man argument. That hipster urbanists and their media aiders and abettors want “density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments” while normal people want “home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and ‘human scale’ neighborhoods”.
Of course not all urbanists are hipsters, and they certainly are not aided and abetted by tomtom wielding editors at the Province. Really what they want is to expand access to home-ownership by allowing more density in cities, expand access to employment throughout the metropolitan area by expanding rapid transit, create more human scaled neighbourhoods by breaking the stranglehold of auto-dominated development patterns and create more complete neighbourhoods that encourage things like better schools and aging in place.
So, how would the “ideal” city look like ? Where in the world do we have that, or come close to it ?
Many people rewrite the same information, with a slightly different twist. It shows they believe in their message. Is there a valid critique of Kotkin’s stats? A similar survey here showed most people aspired to eventually own a single family home. Those who do not are the outliers. It is strange that the obscene run-up in Vancouver house prices hasn’t been painted as an anti-environmental trend that forces families further out into the suburbs.
With people marrying later, i suppose early-twenties attractions like the Granville Binge Drinking District (oops, I mean Enterainment District) are appealling for a larger cohort, but eventually it wears thin and isn’t really compatible with the little ones getting a good night’s sleep.
I would like to retire in wealth by the time I’m 40. Do you think that if you did a survey, most people would, too?
I love the quote “A vast majority of people — roughly 8o percent — prefer a single-family home, whether in the city or surrounding communities.”
A more clear way to phrase the survey question is would you prefer 2000 square feet and a yard or 700 square feet. This question is meaningless without associated prices. Or if you wanted to hold prices constant how about the question would you prefer a condo in Vancouver or a house in Chilliwack.
There is this perception floating around that you can just wave a magic wand and everyone can have an affordably priced detached house located close to the heart of the city. This is not reality.
It was 12 years ago, what changed?
Two intertwined relationships called supply and demand
The fact is that downtown Vancouver has one of the fastest growing populations of children anywhere. The last time I was in the Downtown South area I saw an amazing number of people pushing strollers. Elsie Roy Elementary was built to handle new families, but demand was so high that nearly half the kids who enrolled were forced to attend schools outside the area. Now they’re building a second new elementary school and it’s being expanded before it even opens. The only comparable area near Vancouver is the land south of UBC campus where they opened a 900 student high school then tore down the original 400 student high school and replaced it with a new elementary school. Last time I was in the area I saw a sign indicating that another elementary school will be built behind the high school.
Both explosions of children are happening in areas dominated by mid-rise buildings far from the nearest single family house.