As I wrote in my earlier post about Lar Lerup’s book One Million Acres & No Zoning, Lerup posits that Houston will require a “great retro-fit” to fix the problems that we have baked in to our city through 70-odd years of terrible planning. As Lerup put it, “The small but active group of ‘progressives’ and the large majority are worlds apart. While progressives see the need for radical reorganization of housing, by increasing density near freeways to shorten commuting distances and thereby de-emphasize single-family housing, the others strive not to give up on the original desire to live in the suburbs.” And why are the suburbs so attractive? I grew up in a classic American suburb with high speed arterials, culs-de-sac, etc. I liked it just fine. But part of why people like suburbs is that it is a kind of living that is subsidized by everyone else.
This is the latest video from my second favorite urbanist YouTube channel, Not Just Bikes. (My favorite is CityNerd.) Not Just Bikes shows how consultants veiwed a city through the lens of ROI. This appeals to the MBA in me. When you work for a corporation and are dealing with a large capital expense, you have guys like me who perform insanely complex calculations of “net present value” as part of the decision-making process. If the value of a project is less that zero, you don’t do it. Pretty simple.
What the Not Just Bikes guy shows, using data from urban consulting firms who atomized the city of Lafayette (and many others) to show the ROI or NPV of individual properties. The main consulting firm is Urban3, who write that they take a “different approach to land value economics, property and retail tax analysis, and community design. We empower communities with new insights into their own data. Our work makes a quantifiable case for better city planning, urban design, and smarter growth. And we back up our stories with facts and figures.”
This is Urban3’s map of net revenue per acre for Ogden, Utah, taken from their website. The tall spikes are downtown and neighborhoods with relatively high-density land-use. What Urban3 has discovered is that single family homes are, for obvious reasons, more expensive than almost any other kind of urban land use. They produce less tax revenue compared to the cost of services they require.
That’s the problem with Houston—nearly all of the city consists of single family homes that require roads, sewage, and other city services. The services all cost much more than the taxes those homes bring to the municipality. And let’s be honest—Houston is never getting rid of its suburbs. When people try to “densify” the suburbs, people complain bitterly. And these complainers have a lot of political power. For example, when they tried to build a high-rise apartment in the Museum District, residents fought back successfully. Or whenever it is suggested that the train lines reach out to western suburbs, those suburbs act as if we are confiscating their cars. You see a lot of bizarre racist complaints, like that black robbers will take the train to our lily-white suburb and cause mayhem. (Although perhaps I’m reading too much into the what the loudmouths say in the comments section of the Houston Chronicle.)
Of course, Not Just Bikes produced the classic video “Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston),” which I have discussed before.
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