Marginal Revolution: How Green are Cities?

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How Green are Cities?

Ed Glaeser writes:

Manhattan, not suburbia, is the real friend of the environment. Those alleged nature lovers who live on multiacre estates surrounded by trees and lawn consume vast amounts of space and energy. If the environmental footprint of the average suburban home is a size 15 hiking boot, the environmental footprint of a New York apartment is a stiletto-heeled Jimmy Choo. Eight million New Yorkers use only 301 square miles, which comes to less than one-fortieth of an acre a person. Even supposedly green Portland, Ore., is using up more than six times as much land a person than New York.

New York's biggest environmental contribution lies in the fact that less than one-third of New Yorkers drive to work. Nationwide, more than seven out of eight commuters drive.

I get the point but I don't quite buy this. Manhattan sells services, most notably finance and entertainment, to the rest of America, and in turns draws upon industrial outputs, which of course include steel and glass. It is also no accident that Gary, Indiana is near Chicago and those rather aesthetically thrilling factories off the New Jersey Turnpike are right outside New York City. Try the other boroughs as well, they don't call Staten Island a big garbage dump for nothing. Praising Manhattan is a bit like looking only at the roof of a car and concluding it doesn't burn much gas. Manhattan supports its density only by being surrounded by a broader load of crud.

Perhaps a better question concerns the margin. If we tax Peoria and subsidize Manhattan an extra bit, and induce some migration, does the total environment footprint of mankind go up or down? For instance building up rather than out saves space but it also costs more construction energy and attracts more commuters and leads to more surrounding crud.

If you think the big problem is humans grabbing more and more space, you might prefer to tax suburbs and subsidize cities. If you think the big problem is humans using more and more energy, the opposite conclusion might follow. Suburbs are bad for burning gas, but they are an especially efficient place to work, buy things, and raise children.

A subsidy to 5th Avenue is also a subsidy to Port Newark. Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 1, 2007 at 10:03 PM in Economics | Permalink

Comments

Hi Tyler,

Glaeser and I have written on the benefits of sprawl. A free copy of our Handbook Chapter is available here:
http://www.econ.brown.edu/faculty/henderson/handbook.html

When a yuppie lives and works in Manhattan, he lives a more compact "new urbanist" life that requires less driving and energy consumption than
if the same guy suburbanized. The definition of suburbia is having more private space. This offers private environmental benefits (your own lawn) but
imposes social costs.

You are right that rusting urban industrial America is gross but declining transportation costs have allowed for a separation between
consumption and production. Urbanites can purchase manufactured products that were made in rural areas using new manufacturing technology. This is the
Coase theorem at work! I have written about domestic pollution havens but the public health costs are low when a new clean factory produces
in a low density community and then ships final output to big cities.

You are right that the Staten Islands and Gary Indianas of the world need a makeover. This is why Glaeser's work documenting "Consumer City" is such an important idea.
Durable capital in these cities must be ripped down and brownfields need to be transformed into greenfields and then hold an auction to
allocate the land to the highest bidder.

As you know, I discuss all of these issues in my Green Cities book.

Posted by: Matthew Kahn at Feb 1, 2007 10:33:49 PM

>If we tax Peoria and subsidize Manhattan an extra bit,
>and induce some migration

Subsidize Manhattan an extra bit? Manhattan is subsidizing the rest of the country, not vice versa.

Posted by: richard at Feb 1, 2007 10:47:57 PM

I don't think your objection quite addresses the point. It seems to me that Glaeser is claiming that it is the residential pattern of Manhattan, not its business activity, that is easier on the environment than suburbia.

Surely it is unarguable that a person living in a relatively small apartment in a high-rise, or even a 3-4 story building, is less of an environmental burden that the suburbanite with a lawn, etc. This is even more the case when many of these people ride subways to work rather than driving.

It's probably true that building "up rather than out" uses more energy, per square foot, in the construction process, but I don't see why that's the end of the calculation of comaparative energy use. Small uses less than big.

Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Feb 1, 2007 11:05:09 PM

Tyler, why are you thinking only of the up-front costs of the construction process? Surely you understand that the lifetime energy costs of a large residential building with many housing units are much lower than the energy costs in an equivalent number of housing units in smaller buildings in the suburbs? Add to that the energy costs of transportation for those commuting from suburbs and the difference is enormous.

Posted by: Joey at Feb 1, 2007 11:22:58 PM

Here's my own thought experiment: if we applied a Pigovian tax on energy pollution and -- what looks to be Glaeser's focus -- on land (say an extra $10 per acre per year), on whom would these taxes ultimately be incident? We (I live in Brooklyn) eat food grown on farms, and thus use farmland, but I have little doubt we would pay less in this land tax than suburbanites or others would. Energy used to heat/cool our homes (tiny little apartments) and for commuting are also, I expect, less than for the average person in Iowa (where I grew up).

I don't expect that most people who read this blog think that they can blame the power company -- or the town in which it sites its plants -- for the pollution produced when they consume electricity, or that they aren't responsible for the space they use in the landfill. It's still less than it would be if we lived a more spread-out existence.

Posted by: dWj at Feb 1, 2007 11:24:13 PM

A paradox, then: highly urban areas are more efficient places to live; yet they are also more expensive areas to live. Why the long-lasting disequilibrium? What is the urbanite paying for, if they consume less?

(Any scarcity-based response should also deal with the notion that the supply of urban real estate is not, in the long run, inelastic. Manhattan has not always been there.)

Posted by: Cyrus at Feb 1, 2007 11:30:55 PM

"Suburbs are bad for burning gas, but they are an especially efficient place to work, buy things, and raise children. "

Tyler - I don't quite follow your reasoning. When I lived in a city, it was easy for me to get to a store. Now that I live in the burbs I have further to travel, and I do so in a single person vehicle. How is this more efficient?

Posted by: Anonymouse at Feb 1, 2007 11:49:44 PM

Cyrus:

political culture which fetishises 'family home', car culture, and over investment in these; the richer people living in suburban areas pulling more money into generalized subsidies which poorer people can then take advantage of, etc

Posted by: yoyo at Feb 2, 2007 12:08:26 AM

I have a really good idea. New York should keep all it garbage, turn it into compost and/or mulch and raise all its comestibles on the rooftops and other open areas. That way they won't waste all that energy bringing in and hauling out stuff from and to other places. Maybe put a big plastic dome over the city and make it Spaceship New York.

Posted by: JorgXMcKie at Feb 2, 2007 12:14:58 AM

An aside: it's irritating that Pigovian social engineering seems to be all the rage among economists these days. Many one-time libertarians have morphed into policy-wonky kids in the candy store with all their wonderful ideas about how they're going to use "externality capture" to hammer society into a form more suited to their prejudices. Maybe it'll even bring about the New Soviet Man!

Posted by: Foobarista at Feb 2, 2007 12:37:35 AM

Cyrus: If you take a course in microeconomic theory, your paradox will go away immediately. Under the standard economic conception of "efficiency," situations in which externalities are not internalized due to high negotiating costs, weak contract law, and government inaction are inefficent. Consider a parallel question:

"A paradox, then: candy factories that pay Pigovian taxes on pollution produce candy more efficiently; yet they also produce candy more expensively. Why the long-lasting disequilibrium?"

It is possible that Tyler is right, and city life is less efficient; maybe Glaeser is right, and it's more efficient. But there is certainly no paradox.

Posted by: oii at Feb 2, 2007 12:58:08 AM

A related thought came to me when I read some report about how China's economy would stop growing at some point because its energy usage per GDP was much higher than that of the US. But, it is the higher energy usage per GDP of China that enables the lower one of the US, because the US needs the things China uses a lot of energy making and returns debt and less energy intensive things.

Posted by: bhauth at Feb 2, 2007 4:30:42 AM

dWj:

A tax on land would simply incide on *landowners* with no excess burden on the economy (provided that it was less than the total land rent). The pattern of land *use* is irrelevant - in fact, land taxes typically spur efficiency by discouraging land speculation and increasing allocative liquidity. This is one of the most firmly established principles of economics.

Posted by: guest at Feb 2, 2007 5:04:20 AM

The China point is a good one: the US and other countries that trade with China are offshoring their pollution and CO2 emissions to China.

Posted by: Foobarista at Feb 2, 2007 5:27:53 AM

Trying to put together the many good points made so far, I think the relevant question is: In a global economy (I live in Chile), why may the expected environmental cost of a new born depend on where he/she is born? There may be two reasons for significant cost differentials. One is wealth: the wealthier the new born is expected to be, the higher the environmental cost. Wealthy people are likely to live in places where the environmental cost of providing local services to them is the highest (from Tyler's comments, I assume that the papers by Glaeser and others don't take into account the environmental cost of providing these services to Manhattan residents). The other is the large distortions in current location patterns due to government intervention but also to "spontaneous" segmentation. Albeit difficult to assess, the distortions may be more important than wealth.

Posted by: Edgardo at Feb 2, 2007 5:29:21 AM

All these arguments seem superficial to me. No one has talked much about water, sewage, and electricity/natural gas. In most systems the desire is for the most decentrallized that still spans the problem.
Coastal cities could be replaced in a business infrastructure with better telecommunications, super-super-ships that never enter a port and hovercraft that could land large cargoes at most shore points.
The only function that can't be replaced is as a vacation destination.

Posted by: huggy at Feb 2, 2007 7:17:21 AM

What Bernard Yomtov said. I don't see how it can be denied that residential living patterns among lawyers like myself who live in New York City are much more energy-efficient than they are among my many colleagues who live in Chappaqua. It has nothing to do with our line of work (we're all lawyers), but our mode of life. (Just as a tiny example, the heat from my apartment goes to my upstairs neighbor, the heat from a house in Chappaqua is dissipated through the roof.)

I don't think the non-commuting utopia envisioned by huggy is viable. Millions of years of evolution as a highly social species have made us very good at assessing people whom we meed face to face, and much less good at assessing people with whom we communicate by email. The bonds of trust and understanding, which are essential to business commerce, will always require face to face contact.

Posted by: y81 at Feb 2, 2007 9:15:36 AM

You're all just considering the benefits from the living patterns, and not the environmental costs from the accompanying economic activities needed to sustain population density.

Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Feb 2, 2007 9:25:43 AM

The New Yorker had an article about this several years ago. See here.

Disclaimer: the author is a family friend.

Posted by: Dave at Feb 2, 2007 9:27:19 AM

I'm going to point you to a (rather long) essay by Paul Graham, called Why Nerds are Unpopular.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

One of his points is that the "teen angst" that we have in the "modern world" is a side effect of suburbia. Young adults, in previous centuries, worked, or at the minimum had something useful to do. Today, they're locked up in an environment that degenerates into something closer to Lord of the Flies.

While some folks complain that Paul's representation of Jr High and High schools doesn't represent their experience, I've also met folks for whom it is an accurate depiction of their teen years.

If you read Jane Jacobs, cities have a reason to exist, and when you have an import replacing district, it will always grow into a city.

The suburbs were made possible by cheap gasolene, and when the age of cheap gas is over, the suburbs will vanish. Looking for alternative energy or alternatives to the car culture poop out because those alternatives can't be made to keep the suburbs going.

Posted by: Peter at Feb 2, 2007 9:50:58 AM

Clearly the difference in domestic land use isn't the whole story but cities are more efficient than suberbs in the resources in per capita. Sure every new yorker needs a certain amount of land to supply them with food. A certain amount of land to dispose of their waste. But people in the suburbs need more of both of these. It makes no sense to me to suggest that people living in smaller spaces who walk or take public transportation to go to their jobs and to do their errands are somehow less efficient than those in the suburbs because they need to do the same things that people in the suburbs need to do too. The argument is like saying that 15 is less than 1 when you add 20 to both sides.

Posted by: Michael Foody at Feb 2, 2007 11:00:37 AM

I could be missing something here, but isn't this debate resolved by calculating the full energy consumption of the average urbanite vs. the average suburbanite--that is, not just whether they drive and how far and how much it costs to build their home, but how much energy and what kind is used to provide their power, heat and AC and to produce and transport their food and clothing etc. I'm aware that this would be a knotty calculation, but I suspect someone has done it.

But I agree with Tyler's underlying point that there's a lot of anti-suburban posturing and environmental self-righteousness among urbanites (and I'm one and probably often guilty too). I suspect the 'burbs beat the cities on some green indicators and fall short on others.

Posted by: Tim Gray at Feb 2, 2007 11:05:19 AM

You're all just considering the benefits from the living patterns, and not the environmental costs from the accompanying economic activities needed to sustain population density.

Are you referring to the economic activities of Manhattanites, like finance and entertainment services, or the activity needed to support residents, like utilities, garbage disposal, etc?

Would either of these make less of an environmental impact if the residents of Manhattan were all spread out in suburbs? Seems unlikely to me.

Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Feb 2, 2007 11:11:02 AM

Tyler,

I think whether we should prefer density would depend. Density might easily win on both energy use and land use counts if the population stabilizes or if urban density contributes to lower birth rates. That should close the gap between energy use in cities and in suburbs because the buildings are sunk energy costs; provided the replacement rate for high density residential and commercial development is low enough, it should produce savings in land use and energy long term.

Posted by: Steven Schreiber at Feb 2, 2007 11:45:37 AM

I don't follow Tyler's point. In what way is more energy consumption required to sustain my urban lifestyle than what is required to sustain my colleagues in Chappaqua? We both shop at grocery stores that receive their supplies by truck (only the last mile of the delivery paths is different). They shop at shopping malls and I shop at department stores which, again, lie at the end of very similar delivery paths. Can someone give an example of an energy-intensive activity that is required to indirectlys support my lifestle and not that of my suburban commuter colleague?

Posted by: y81 at Feb 2, 2007 1:34:05 PM

When you ask "If we tax Peoria and subsidize Manhattan an extra bit, and induce some migration, does the total environment footprint of mankind go up or down?" The answer is a resounding "down." Big apartment buildings take less energy and resources to build per unit (compare the marginal cost of an additional appartment in a building to the marginal cost of a house), take dramatically less to heat and cool, and lead to the scale economies that make walking instead of driving possible. I mean, if everyone in america lived like they do in NYC they would all fit in Maryland and would drive 133 million fewer cars...

And a second point on "just considering the benefits from the living patterns, not the environmental costs from the accompanying economic activities needed to sustain population density;" those costs are greater in less dense communities. Gary Indiana and the factories on the turnpike make the products that serve everyone in the country, not just those in NYC or Chicago. They just must be trucked further to each and every town in the midwest or midatlantic, down every long drive way, to every distant mall. Likewise everyone's garbage from suburbia has to end up in a landfill somewhere. The environmental costs to produce the things that people buy don't depend on where people live (beyond the costs of transport) nor does the total amount of garbage they produce. At worst they should be the same for New Yorkers or for suburbanites. However, the transport costs are bigger for the suburbs; the garbage man has to drive to every house instead of stopping at one building; if you live in the city you don't need to drive to the store to buy the products built in Gary; you only need to sand and salt manhattan when it snows instead of hundreds of miles of highway; your electricity lines or sewer lines don't need to tower over the landscape or be dug into fields.....

Posted by: adam at Feb 2, 2007 4:09:44 PM

You're all just considering the benefits from the living patterns, and not the environmental costs from the accompanying economic activities needed to sustain population density.

Right. I'm not getting what the excess costs from density are. (That is, there are larger roads and more trucks entering Manhattan than almost any other area of equal size, there are bigger landfills nearby than in relation to any other area of equal size. Sure. But if you compare on the basis of population -- Manhattan against however many square states out West it takes to match its population -- I think it still looks good.)

What are the excess costs I'm missing?

Posted by: LizardBreath at Feb 2, 2007 4:17:08 PM

Dense living arrangements involve larger pieces of infrastructure. As opposed to smaller, more modular units of infrastructure, building these requires more time, more financial risk, and more specialized skills. Likewise, maintaining them involves larger organizations, more specialized skills.

Does the urbanite, then, pay a premium for the more intensive use urban living arrangments make of human and financial resources?

Posted by: Cyrus at Feb 2, 2007 5:25:13 PM

Yeah, I don't get it either. I would figure higher population densities would leverage economies of scale. Everything you create will serve more people at the same time. Entertainment costs go down, because the same show or movie can be displayed to more people at one time. Transportation costs go down because more people are going to the same places.

I would think even infrastructure costs go down because you can build fewer larger facilities instead of smaller more numerous facilities that are geographically scattered. And maintenance of fewer larger facilities would cost less than that of more numerous smaller facilities. The latter requires more wires, pipes, ducts, conduits, and what-have-you. This also means more points of failure and more maintenance personnel (or transportation of the same personnel from facility to facility).

Posted by: fling93 at Feb 2, 2007 5:39:37 PM

Yeah, I have to say the proposition that there aren't those economies of scale surprises me, to the point that I'd have a hard time accepting it without empirical backup. It could be true, but I'm not seeing it.

Posted by: LizardBreath at Feb 2, 2007 8:43:09 PM

Aye Yae Yae.

So little good information so much posturing on the part of the urbanists. It would be of little surprise to me if the suburbanite and rural citizens have far less of a footprint then the average urbanist. Why? Because like most people with blinders on the urbanists only discuss costs. Surely, it would appear that the urban apartement may use less energy in the winter to heat, but from where does this energy come from? It is dispersed throughout the land. Similarly sewage on a large enough parcel ~1 acre generates little excess and is well "recycled." Cities have a far more laborious task in recycling their sewage, one that takes substantially more energy. From where does the urbanist get there water? At some time or another it probably ran off my land.

What about running the mass transportation that the urbanists love even when there are 5 people on it, the trains are running burning energy, my car and motorcycle are only used when I am going somewhere. My dispersed land can generate energy through crops and solar systems that no apartment can. The urbanists are thinking small in terms of gross "cost," that is silly the relevant consideration is "net" impact, which seems like suburbia has a far better chance of coming out ahead.

Posted by: Joel B. at Feb 2, 2007 9:12:55 PM

Also, the cost of constructing a single family home, is fairly minimal compared to the cost of erecting a high rise, a single family home also largely consists of renewables such as timber, a skyscraper not so much.

Posted by: Joel B. at Feb 2, 2007 9:14:26 PM

Joel B., if you lived in the Croton watershed, you would know that the City of New York spends considerable time and money to ensure that our water does not run off quarter-acre suburban lots (because such water is poisoned by nitrates, weed-killers and pesticides). Now, if you live on a hundred-acre farm, that is different, but we are not comparing urbanites to true farmers, but to suburbanites.

Posted by: y81 at Feb 2, 2007 9:25:43 PM

Just wanted to thank you selfless suburbanites for sacrificing density and living out on the barren plain.

(Tyler, pack it in; if your suburban dreamworld were proven to be vastly un-ecological, you'd move downtown?)

Posted by: delirious at Feb 2, 2007 11:02:52 PM

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~albouy/federaltaxes.pdf

This paper by David Albouy, who is on the job market this year from Berkeley, is relevant to the discussion. He notes, using an updated version of the famous Roback model of locational choice, that some cities are likely too small because the federal income tax applies to nominal rather than real (cost of living) adjusted income.

Jeff

Posted by: Jeff Smith at Feb 3, 2007 10:08:52 AM

My tax professor in law school had a great response to my complaint that income taxes are inherently unfair because they fail to take into account the cost of living adjusted income. This is no failure, just a tax on the imputed income of living in New York.

Posted by: John at Feb 3, 2007 2:48:53 PM

Joel B: but from where does this energy come from? It is dispersed throughout the land. Similarly sewage on a large enough parcel ~1 acre generates little excess and is well "recycled." Cities have a far more laborious task in recycling their sewage, one that takes substantially more energy. From where does the urbanist get there water? At some time or another it probably ran off my land.

You are basically saying that each person uses up a certain amount of land resources regardless of density. This only tells us the ideal number of total people that can be supported by a given amount of land; it says nothing about the optimal distribution of said people across said land, just the total. You'd get identical footprints whether you space everybody evenly or clump them all in cities surrounded by empty space (save for solar panels and sewage and water treatment facilities).

Posted by: fling93 at Feb 4, 2007 2:53:33 PM

"Praising Manhattan is a bit like looking only at the roof of a car and concluding it doesn't burn much gas. Manhattan supports its density only by being surrounded by a broader load of crud."

This shows up in the statistics for microstates like Singapore, Hongkong, and Monaco. These states often have very good results for statistics like income and enviromental footprint, but in reality, they are just a city, with the hinterland classified as a different country. If Mannhattan was a separate nation it would probably be the richest per capita in the world.

Posted by: Patrick at Feb 5, 2007 2:58:23 AM

Urban living involves "density" externalities on both the positive and negative sides. On the positive side you will likely have a shorter trip to find someone who would like to trade their cash for your skills or output and are likely to have a shorter trip to find the goods, services or mate that you desire. On the negative side you are more likely to experience the waste noise, soot, garbage and sewage of your neighbors and have more nearby hazards to your offspring. Substantial efforts and resources are devoted to abating these hazards in the urban environment. Fewer resources are required to abate them in rural/suburban settings.

As someone who completes environmental remediation projects in rural, suburban and urban settings it is evident that the costs of completing projects scales up with the population density. One major cost difference is regulatory compliance which consumes real resources, but all manner of congestion problems add to the costs in the city. Urbanites who do not also work in suburban and rural settings are probably (blissfully) unaware of the difference.

The people who I have seen compile environmental footprint statistics tend to be somewhat effective at capturing positive urban externalities while in general ignore the negative urban externalities. My intuition is that the cost of the resources used to abate urban environmental hazards (such as the compliance costs in my work) is reflected in the cost of living there. In our interdependent economy I suspect that annual household expenditure is a better proxy for "total environmental footprint" than most so-called "environmental footprint" statistics. (I think this is Cyrus' point.)

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Posted by: mirror at Feb 6, 2007 4:01:35 PM

To everyone suggesting that their 10' x 20' studio apartment is somehow more efficient than a suburban McMansion, I would ask you how much of your residence is built from steel and concrete? Very large environmental footprints will be found if you start looking at what it takes to create those materials and deliver them to manhattan. The McMansion, OTOH, is mostly built from renewable wood and only requires concrete for the foundation...

Posted by: Jim at Feb 7, 2007 7:37:12 PM

If you aren't looking at per capita comparisons, it's a silly exercise. A Hummer uses less energy than a bus. If 20 people have to get to work, please tell me you aren't arguing that it is better for the environment if they all drive their own Hummers instead of taking 1 bus.

"Suburbs...are an especially efficient place to work, buy things, and raise children. "

I don't see what possible definition of 'efficient' makes this statement true. 'Convenient' maybe, but efficient? please explain.

Yes, I'll admit that the 8 million people in the New York City area use more energy, create more waste, and use more space than a suburb of 100,000 people. But multiple the average environmental impact of those 100,000 people by 80 to make a fair comparison and it's a much different story.

Posted by: pt at Feb 7, 2007 10:50:09 PM

So, you think that 100K x 80 will end up having a larger environmental footprint than NYC?

Let see, the small town I grew up in was about 100K people. Unlike manhattan it was very inefficient in its use of land, but space is something this country has _a lot_ of and its inhabitants did not cut down all of the trees to cram in more people. It does not pipe its water in and shit out through hundreds of miles of huge pipes made of concrete. Most buildings are made of wood and brick rather than concrete and steel. The bulk of these buildings are less than 30 years old but a significant fraction (>20%) are 100+ year-old victorians. While it takes more maintenance energy to heat and cool this small town the bulk of the electricity is generated inside the city itself so the transmission loss is negligable compared to pulling power several hundred miles. Winter is a bitch, so everyone insulates the hell out of their houses as well. Few people use the available public transport, but no one is commuting more than 15 miles to get to work and for most people the average commute is probably 5 miles or less. The area around this city is farm country, so SUVs and trucks are the preferred mode of transportation. OTOH, since this city "wastes" so much space there is no need for parking garages (more steel and concrete) except in a few locations.

I left the hinterlands for the bright lights of the big city and never looked back, but I think if you actually visited any of these places you might be surprised at the efficiencies to be found in locations where the average income is lower but the cost of energy is not too far removed from what NYC residents pay.

Posted by: Jim at Feb 8, 2007 2:11:29 AM

So, you're saying that New Yorkers couldn't live so closely if they didn't couldn't sell factory-made goods from New Jersey? That's a bizarre and entirely unfounded claim. Your post is moronic as it stands; if there is an argument in there it's completely unexplained.

Posted by: Dave at Feb 8, 2007 8:30:12 AM

I would recommend searching for facts; in this thread I've been reading a lot of opinion and conjecture. I started at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_New_York_City#Energy_efficiency. I'm sure some of you can find better sources.

If you want to compare suburbia to Manhattan, hunt up some data. What's the relative per-capita consumption of gasoline? electricity? fresh water? Steel? Wood? Paper? Concrete? Polyethylene? Tungstun?

Facts, please. We can argue all day about whether a MacMansion is more comfortable than a high-rise, or whether MacDonalds has better food than Gino's Pizzaria, or whether we'd rather be stuck on the freeway in our Assault Vehicles or crammed into a subway car, but this argument isn't about aesthetics. It's about efficiency.

What about time efficiency? How much time do suburbanites spend shopping relative to urbanites? Traveling to work? Taking the kids to school? Going to church?

I don't know the answers, but I'll bet there are people who spend their waking hours writing reports about this stuff. Look around.

Posted by: Michael at Feb 8, 2007 8:00:19 PM

This is a very interesting discussion. Many of the questions raised here have been on my mind for a long time.

Just one thing:

Is a city like New York still dumping its trash into landfills?

Here in Switzerland the cities want us to separate our trash and then they - after having collected the stuff, recycle the glass and the metals and doing whatever with the potentially noxious batteries and burn the combustible rest (thus producing heat which is used to heat buildings - yes, here you can buy heat from the city - there are heat pipes running through the whole town);

the filters that are used to clean the exhaust gasses of the trash burning plant are seemlingly so efficient that the air exiting it is actually cleaner than the one entering it (with the notable exception of CO2... but still).

Electronics of all sorts can be given back at any store that sells these (or similar) things - we pay a - small - extra 'disposal tax' in advance on every such thing we buy (kinda funny experience if you're about to buy the latest, greatest, brand-new gimmik). Afterwards, they become dimantdled and shredded - most the (precious) materials are recycled so that only very little remains to be buried.

So what are you guys doing?

Posted by: Peter at Feb 9, 2007 10:46:19 PM

The outsourcing of pollution of which you speak appears to be part of
a larger tendency to separate residential and commercial functions. A
suburban community of the "bedroom" type is the most extreme
concentration of the former, with the other extreme represented by
communities that render on street-level maps as essentially
railyards--Gary, IN, Edison, NJ, East St. Louis, IL, etc. That those
IN, NJ and IL cities are "suburbs" of cities in IL, NY and MO,
respectively, is probably no coincidence. It seems that an even
higher priority than the geographic separation of residence-of-choice
and the means of production is the jurisdictional separation of these
elements. One of the most doctrinaire and militant tenets of the
American ideology is "thou shalt not redistribute wealth." This
ensures that shared assets and shared liabilities alike may only be
shared by a basically means-homogenous population.

Please allow me to tell you a little about my own home town, Detroit,
MI. It ain't for nothing it's called the motor city. Here
carlessness carries almost as much social stigma as homelessness, and
the carless and even late-model carless are brazenly discriminated
against by employers, intensifying the exploitation of the "subprime"
class. As in most American metropolitan areas, the suburbs function
primarily as inorganic "planned communities" whose building codes
mandate horizontal, low density land use, effectively ruling out the
possibility of cheap housing, let alone mass transit, cycling and
other alternatives to the other money pit. Those suburbs not exclusive
enough to function as bedroom communities also have a business
community, attracting capital, as usual, by being more business
friendly (i.e. politically conservative) than Detroit, with its
laudable century-long tradition of progressive values and labor and
civil rights activism. So intensifies the segregation of not only
geographic, but human "assets" and "liabilities" (assuming the
Calvinist-Objectivist dogma that money is the measure of man, which I
can't reject forcefully enough). Predictably, the boycotted city is
unable to "keep its financial house in order" and the in loco
parentis instrument of "state receivership" is held over
Detroiters' heads. So much for Michigan's proud tradition as a "home
rule" state. The solution, almost never stated explicitly, is that
Detroit must give up on its progressive values and swallow the bitter
pill; that being the fact that sources of development capital must be
kissed up to. Commerce, as usual, directs policy. At the national
level Wall Street says "jump" and Washington says "how high?"
Globally, the punishment for not kissing the World Bank's ass is
unimaginable suffering. Granted, some on the ground play into the
hands of the ideologues of competition by honoring human-invented
moral principles that value human fertility as an unqualified good.

I am pessimistic about possibilities for a solution, but I think there
may be merit in what RAW called "group cleverness." A high priority
goal of grass-roots (as opposed to classified/proprietary)
research should be the invention of some technological means
(political means having failed) of giving the invisible hand the
bionic handshake. If at first you don' succeed, try, try again...

Posted by: Lori at Feb 24, 2007 3:03:46 PM

:-) Oops. Meant to post the following instead:

The outsourcing of pollution of which you speak appears to be part of a larger tendency to separate residential and commercial functions. A suburban community of the "bedroom" type is the most extreme concentration of the former, with the other extreme represented by communities that render on street-level maps as essentially railyards--Gary, IN, Edison, NJ, East St. Louis, IL, etc. That those IN, NJ and IL cities are "suburbs" of cities in IL, NY and MO, respectively, is probably no coincidence. It seems that an even higher priority than the geographic separation of residence-of-choice and the means of production is the jurisdictional separation of these elements. One of the most doctrinaire and militant tenets of the American ideology is "thou shalt not redistribute wealth." This ensures that shared assets and shared liabilities alike may only be shared by a basically means-homogenous population. This can only lead to positive feedback and disadvantaged communities spiraling further into insolvency. This results in loss of self-government through state receivership or de facto means, a situation analogous to domination of the developing world by the developed. Change is on the latter's terms, because the former, on paper, can't keep its house in order.

Posted by: Lori at Feb 24, 2007 3:05:36 PM

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