Equilibrium Part 3 - The Suburbs
Many of us live in lower-order equilibria. What does it take to cycle up?
Note: This is Part 3 of a three-part series. You can read Part 2 by following the embed below.
The typical healthy American suburb operates at a comfortable equilibrium, self-sustaining and reproducing jobs, services, and population – this is what I mean by ‘health’. But it is often a relatively less productive complex system than it is capable of being. The average population density at which suburbs operate is not some kind of illegitimate density, of course. There are good reasons for populations of that density existing and good places and conditions for it to exist. But the trouble with many suburbs is that they are lower-order equilibria. They function in the bare sense that they convey people and resources, host commerce and recreation and domestic life, and seem to self-sustain at least for a time. But they are relatively resource-inefficient. They do less with more. And more fundamentally, in many healthy and growing places they operate with enormous latent pressure put on them to upcycle into a higher-order equilibrium, a pressure with no escape valve but strangling property values. Let’s use the six ideas for heuristics developed in Part 2 to describe interventions into a complex system like a typical Sun Belt suburb, by far the newest and most refined version of the suburb, to illustrate these points and suggest a way forward for those considering ways to improve or re-imagine them.
Observe carefully. People live in suburbs, and generally enjoy them. Why? If you are inclined to, don't be snide about the mode of living you observe; study the dynamics at play, seek to understand the bonafides of the suburb, and develop hypotheses for why the suburbs are built that don't fall prey to an overly deterministic description. Understand the inflows and outflows that make them function, pay attention to the externalities they offload, watch how people move through them and how goods and services are distributed. Seek to understand the regulatory schema and the legal and infrastructural landscape in which they thrive.
Disturb tactically. The patchwork of land use regulations and ownership common to a suburb almost ensures that when they are intervened in, those interventions will be tactical in scale by necessity. Given the patchy, mosaic-like nature of suburbs, running many small experiments across this landscape can give vital feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Look for local optimizations across the board. The development of a semi-permanent biergarten in a little-used parking lot can have benefits which cascade outside of its patch, giving employment opportunities, boosting nearby businesses, providing social and cultural opportunities for a relatively atomized population, and lowering the bar for new potential retailers to enter the market and test their own ideas.
Keep your options open. This is especially useful in suburbs, which were planned and designed with a consistent desire to eliminate optionality through restrictive, single-use, and use-segregated zoning. Any intervention would likely need to be a policy one, unfortunately, cracking the shell of zoning restrictions to allow more kinds of land use, alleviating all the weird supply and demand pressures placed on zoned areas where more or less supply than needed was planned. We have all seen dead strip malls and neighborhoods where every available home or apartment is snatched up within hours, or half-developed ghost town neighborhoods with nearby malls or retail centers utterly choked with traffic. These are failures in planning in part because these planning failures just misjudged actual demand, but also failures in that the planning itself assumed that its judgments were and always would be correct and therefore disallowed alternate uses. This effort to keep options open could also take the form of something small and absurdly simple: if you see people breaking the law to keep their own options open – ‘loitering’ on a popular street corner because there are nearby businesses, or trespassing on a vacant lot to play baseball – put a bench there, or a park there. These misuses are signaling a need for optionality that is so overwhelming that it is overflowing social decorum.
Take care of the smallest elements. Attending to the individual residents and workers within a suburb is important. There is far more combined latent creativity and more individual care residing those individuals in total than you can muster yourself. Part of the difficulty of involving oneself in the suburbs is the lack of latitude these individual actors have to make decisions on behalf of their community, bound as they are by single-use zoning, deed restrictions, homeowners' associations, parking minimums, etc. Perhaps a way to support them would be to crack these barriers and let residents undertake a thousand small experiments whose success will generate cascading upsides and whose failures will be constrained in scope.
Don't jump ahead. It is better to respond to demand than to anticipate it poorly, and to create the conditions for positive transformation, than to construct the transformation yourself. City planning actually has good tools at its disposal for this kind of condition-making transformation: zoning regulations, long-range transportation planning, prudent investments in infrastructural capacity. But the missing pieces often are the intermediate stages between land use of one kind and land use of another kind. Someone building on a lot upzoned for high density may only opt to go for medium density because they sense that that is the carrying capacity of existing demand. But ancillary demand for services, parks, retail, office space, and so on induced by the presence of those residents and some transportation infrastructure may, in another thirty years, make it desirable to demolish and replace that project with one of a higher density because demand can accommodate it (and, therefore, the cost of such a transformation is recoverable with profit). Of course, in the typical US city it is probably advisable to always build at the maximum density allowable because of a historic and endemic housing shortage, but in principle the idea is to not try to overproduce past the threshold of current and reasonable future demand. The growth and flux of cities can be unpredictable, and so it is advisable for planners to follow demand and growth, not assume it. Growth creates the conditions and justifications for interventions in response.
Sometimes, do nothing. Once again, there are regulatory elements specific to cities that give the principle 'do nothing' a caveat. Tight restrictions on land use strangle possible upward momentum, and so leaving a city to its own devices often means leaving it in an artificial, high-pressure stasis. If it cannot grow and adapt, it will at best maintain itself or at worst slowly cycle down as other nearby cities outcompete it for residents, jobs, tax revenue, government grants, etc. But in a city with a modicum of flexibility to adapt, it will often adapt fairly well to increased demand without the imposition of big new plans and their accompanying disturbance.
Attempting to apply these heuristics is useful and clarifying. In my mind, at least, potential criticisms practically spring from the page. There are several I want to consider here.
First, what about the coordination problem? For the planner, there is a very real and often justified anxiety about a slack hand at the city's wheel. If transportation infrastructure is built and maintained by one subset and local zoning and neighborhood district changes are written by another subset of a complex system, how to ensure that they are mutually supportive, not conflicting? This is truly one of the most challenging counterpoints to what is essentially my implied argument for decentralizing planning. There are very real and palpable gains to be had for cities which vigorously and centrally manage infrastructural problems like transportation, water, waste, power, and civic functions. Done well, it de-duplicates costly efforts, overrides locally- and narrowly-valid concerns with decisions that achieve the globally best outcome for a larger abstraction of a civic ecosystem, and ensures that the services provided are consistent in quantity and quality.
Perhaps the inversion that has happened in the minds of central planners for whom this infrastructural work is their world is to assume that their work is the tissue, not the circulatory system, of the body of a city. To the extent that these central planning efforts are useful, it is as conveyances -- for people, for water, for sewage, for power -- that are demand-driven. Flexible distribution is truly challenging in the context of the built environment. You can't dynamically change a 2 lane road to a 6 lane road during rush hour (although some cities do have central freeway lanes whose barriers they can shift to flip the direction of a lane, which seems pretty cool in concept). But these conveyances of resources in an ideal world are in response to the needs of the 'smallest organism' in the ecosystem: a person. If a successful and densifying section of a city puts a strain on transportation resources, it might be a powerful signal to the central planner that a light rail line connecting that new section to the heart of the city is needed.
The problem, of course, is that these resource conveyances are costly and slow to build. We should, of course, do everything in our power to make the planning, approval, and construction of conveyances fast. It makes cities more responsive to dynamic demand. But even then, this overall critique of decentralized planning remains. If planning decisions are entirely reactive to conditions on the ground, it could both forestall good growth that requires some conveyances pre-built and stunt growth where the carrying capacity of a growing neighborhood is exceeded, not in built environment but in resources of power, water, and transportation.
As a mild push-back, perhaps the disadvantage of having to wait on over-strained resources -- here I'm mostly thinking of transportation, because a lot of power and water conveyances are more responsive to demand -- is because we think in fairly short timescales. As noted, faster construction is better because it is more responsive. But over the long timescale of the life of a city, this reactive planning looks more prompt. It certainly may not feel prompt, to the 'pioneer' residents of a growing district. But the fact that new conveyances are built at all is what allows a complex system to succeed to the next stage in its cyclic growth.
Another facially valid criticism of decentralized planning is that it hands the keys to the NIMBYs. The usual refrain goes that decentralizing planning stultifies growth because local land interests tend to be more conservative and anti-growth, looking for some kind of misplaced local maximum or an idea about what maximizes their property values rather than the global maximum seen by planners at some distance removed. Examples of this mechanism in action are abundant, and the most visceral example of the war between central and local planning is in the concept of builder's remedy, whereby a state government may overrule a municipality failing to build its share of housing by simply forcing the approval of any new housing proposed for the municipality over local objections.
But the local disapproval of land use changes, a weapon from the NIMBY arsenal, is one which in miniature reproduces the same problem I raised in my point about taking care of the smallest element of a complex system. It is an example of a larger body (a neighborhood planning board, or a municipal zoning commission) disapproving of a request from a smaller body (a developer, a landowner, a co-op) for a change in land use. Presumably, that change, and the attendant project proposed, is an attempt to respond to ambient conditions more flexibly by building what seemed needful. Usually it's more housing, but it could also be a LULU -- a locally unwanted land use like a wastewater treatment plant -- that is needed for the continued and amplified functioning of the complex system, the city, but which isn't wanted there. The argument is often facially about where is the best place to put something like more housing or a LULU, but the sum total of these many disapprovals often seems BANANAs -- building absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.
Arguments about where is the best place to locate something, as articulated in disputes about land use, are not often made in good faith, but these arguments serve as a screen, an acceptable and seemingly value-neutral cover, for the real and less expressible objections incumbents have about upstarts. I hope that it should be clear, but this proposal would tend to give the smaller element greater latitude over its own remit, and fewer ways in which its proposal could be vetoed. Harking back to that fourth point, this requires trust -- trust that a smaller unit may have a better insight into conditions on the ground and what is needful than a unit larger and at a farther remove. And it also introduces the possibility of many more (though smaller-scale) failures. But the theory is that the downside of small failures is capped, but the upside of small successes is that they scale up, and serve as a model for other small successes elsewhere.
When suburban dwellers visit places whose built environment has been laid down over time by many small, tactical interventions, made for a long time by very many people, made for innumerable small purposes and occasional larger, more cohesive purposes, many tend to lament that more such places are not built. Candidly, the car may be responsible for much of the change – cars being very large and inconvenient things to convey and store – but these older and more gradually-planned places so resonate with us because they arise from a deeply human set of patterns that many of us have an almost-instinctual preference for. At some point, we lost our capacity to plan for humans and are living in the aftermath. I myself live by necessity and availability in one such single-use suburb built in the 1970s, and feel this loss deeply. A better and more humane approach to the complex ecosystem of the city may enable places like the one I live to, with thousands of small, spontaneous motions, cycle upward toward a place that is both more productive and efficient with the land it occupies and energetic flows it consumes and produces, but is more recognizably a place built for, and by, humans.