Douglas Kelbaugh,
Dean, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

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Q: How do you define sprawl?
A: Sprawl, to me, in one word is a monoculture, unlike a city which is a vibrant, mixed place where all sorts of things are happening simultaneously. Sprawl tends to be single uses separated into single places. All the shopping's in one place. All the offices are somewhere else. All the housing is someplace else. All the schools and public spaces are somewhere else. So, it tends to be segregated into these monocultural zones which are very large, which are auto dependent. You almost always have to drive between them. People rarely walk. They tend to be segregated also by income and by race and ethnicity. So, they're essentially like these sort of private enclaves that are single use. So, I think maybe maybe the single biggest characteristic is that it's sort of monocultural.

There are other.phpects, the auto dependency I've already referred to, but the fact that people who live in sprawls take ten trips per household per day on average. I think it's eight or nine in Michigan. It's eleven or twelve in parts of Florida and California. That sort of auto dependence is a big part of it. It's low density obviously. It's socially quite uniform. So, it just doesn't have the sort of vitality. It's about privacy rather than community.
Q: When zoning came about in the United States, how did it contribute to sprawl?
A: It didn't at all initially. Zoning was a well-intentioned, very good idea. It was basically, in the words of the 1929 Supreme Court decision, to keep, quote, the pigs out of the parlor. It was meant to keep noxious activities separated from normal activities, particularly residential activities. So, zoning was very important in the Victorian city. You can imagine Dick Kensy in London which was prezoning. What a mess it was. So, it was about cleaning up, keeping the stockyards away from the neighborhoods. And now zoning's mainly about protecting property rights and property values and it's gone too far where single use zones are very large, exclusive both socially in terms of land use. So there's this. Zoning, I think has started to serve a different purpose than it was originally intended for and it started to actually backfire. We need mixed use zoning now, not Euclidian zoning or zoning which tends to separate one thing from another. In a nutshell, zoning has been too successful, particularly in suburbia.
Q: Talk a little bit about the historic roots of sprawl and how it directly connects to the suburbs.
A: Well, I mean it's always been a dream, particularly in the Anglo-American world to live on the land, to be landed gentry, to live in a bucolic, pastoral setting. Suburbs are not new. Brooklyn was the first suburb probably in America across the river from New York from Manhattan - beautiful suburbs up and down the East Coast that were railroad suburbs essentially. London has suburbs. The whole idea of being able to live in the country and work in the city was an ideal that's a very fine one. The problem is after a century or so of this it's now pretty difficult to live in a country and work in a city. There are just so many suburbs that have piled up in ring after ring after ring that the arithmetic doesn't work. To get from the suburb or the rural area to a city requires penetrating - endless suburb between you and the city -- so the American dream of living on a leafy elm street in walking distance of a main street and having the breadwinner, typically the male, when this ideal was conceived, working downtown hasn't panned out. It did, actually, just a generation or two ago you could do that, but now it's just too congested--the trip between the leafy neighborhood and downtown. So, it's an ideal that I think we shouldn't forget. It just can't be provided for everybody. The arithmetic doesn't work. If everybody lives in the suburbs and works downtown or tries to it's dysfunctional.
Q: In your book you make a point that we are the first society in known civilization that has more people living in suburbs than in city and rural areas.
A: Well, the plan has been overwhelmingly rural actually, for a very long time and it's been preponderantly rural for the last couple hundred years. About this time about the millennium we're now equally urban and rural across the whole globe. In the US, though, they're still more suburban. We have more people living in the suburbs than in the city and rural areas combined.
Q: Casting that historically, that seems to be a remarkable thing.
A: I mean it's obviously been enabled by modern technology and in particularly automobile. We can do it and therefore we sort of have done it. It's an aberration. What's bizarre to me is that now when people propose, when developers propose traditional developments along the lines of new urbanism, along the lines of the way our grandparents lived, if not our parents, people now consider that a radical idea. They now take the arterial strip, the regional shopping mall, the office park, the subdivision with all its cul-de-sacs as the norm and anything that goes against that is somehow is against America's right and freedom to live the way they want. So, I mean it's very ironic, what passed for urbanism for two or three thousand years is now considered an aberration in many parts of America.
Q: In some cases, isn't this really an issue of beauty versus ugly and personal definition?
A: Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there's no doubt about it that the suburbs are lush and green. There is more privacy. The question is, how much do you want to trade off for that? I mean in the ideal world I guess we'd all have a bustling main street at our front door and a beautiful rural countryside at our back door. It's impossible, of course, to provide that for everyone. It's impossible to provide that for hardly anybody. So, as an ideal that's a very high bar that Americans have set. I think Americans should have the right. We should personally preserve the right for people to live in low density, green lush environments, but I think you have to pay the true freight and right now we're subsidizing that lifestyle. All sorts of federal policies from the highway program to the mortgage interest deduction to all sorts of other programs that are a little more hidden, the energy, various energy laws and tax policies, the world depletion allowance, etcetera, have tended to subsidize this low density development. So, I'm simply arguing for a level playing field, that if people want to live that way, fine, but they need to pay the full freight and they're only paying part of the freight now and in some ways they're being subsidized by poor people, by people who don't drive as much, by people who live in the inner city.
Q: Take that one step further and talk about cheap gasoline and the land also.
A: If there are two things that are driving this giant ship, the American sort of suburban dream, it's cheap land and cheap gasoline. I would argue, artificially cheap land and artificially cheap gasoline. Gasoline is much cheaper here at the gas pump than anywhere in the industrialized world, maybe a third or a quarter of the cost of Western European economies which are very prosperous economies that aren't disabled by a high gas tax which is the claim made by its detractors here and cheap land. In America a developer can buy farmland and up zone it and make, in some cases, obscene profits by going directly from rural to residential development, essentially cul-de-sac subdivisions.

In Europe that's not the way it works. It's often the public sector that buys the land and up zones it and then resells it and in fact the money doesn't just go into the pockets of the developers, but it goes into the public treasury which is then able to provide all sorts of other civic amenities and good government and good education and everything else. So the cheap land on the periphery of American cities has been one of the main propellers along with cheap energy. You realize that land - people may complain about rising land costs in America, but it's dirt cheap, no pun intended, compared to Europe or Japan. Houses in Japan are so much more expensive in relation to household income that many of the mortgages are multigenerational. They're 100 year mortgages. So, it takes more than one generation to pay it off. We don't know what expensive land is in this country. It's still very cheap by global standards.
Q: How do you then convince Americans, who had the Horace Greely message of "Go West" that land is scarce? Isn't that part of our mentality?
A: It is. It's so much ingrained in the American psyche. It is a bedrock value, this idea of freedom and choice. I would argue that there's not so much choice any more in the typical metropolitan area. We're down to one house type pretty much across America and one garden apartment type. I mean they pretty much look the same whether it's in Mobile, Alabama or Seattle, Washington or Ann Arbor, Michigan. I don't think there is that sort of choice. In terms of this analyst expansion we have obviously filled up the country to a much better extent. There's still a lot of open land. No one is debating that, but if we want to be environmentally sustainable then we have to protect a lot of that. I think maybe this virtual world that is blooming as we speak may become the new frontier for expansion. The physical world can tolerate so much development. The other sad part is our cities, as you know, are quite empty. Why do we keep expanding with ring after ring of suburbs when we have these empty, hollowed out urban cores which have been visited by disinvestments, racial polarization, bad schools, you name it. So, I think it doesn't make social economic environmental sense to keep expanding. And it certainly gobbles up the countryside. So, I think we're going to have to find other media and other venues for this analyst expansion and maybe it will be the virtual world of computers.
Q: What happened to us in the sense of how suburbs were designed? Talk a little bit about the first ring compared to today's third rings and the sense of disconnection that people talk about now in our suburbs. What happened to us there?
A: Well, I think we just continued to follow the same model, again because of cheap land and cheap energy. By the way, the cheap energy not only fueled the ten or twelve automobile trips per household per day, but it makes the heating and cooling of these big free standing buildings artificially cheap as well as to mislead people. As consumers we're all fiscal conservatives. We're all going to try to get the biggest bang for our buck. You can get a bigger bang for your buck in the suburbs in terms of house, but it's because we subsidize much of that pattern of settlement and the energy system that's apported. So, I think we've gotten that for economic reasons and frankly until we get serious about energy costs and land costs, energy conservation and land conservation this is going to continue to be the trend.
Q: Explain how suburbs are subsidized.
A: Well, look at Europe after World War II. They invested in transit. Look at America. It invested primarily in highways, the interstate system which is originally meant to take people from one city to another, but of course now it's used for commuting within a metropolitan region. That has been the biggest public works project in the history of the world, a massive investment that's been over a generation in the making in the U.S. That's a huge subsidy. Suburbia would have never happened to the extent that it has now without that. The Federal government also with it's Federal income tax, mortgage deductions tends to favor people who buy homes over renters, which tends to favor suburbanites over city dwellers. The government itself has tended to decentralize and build its offices out in the hinterland. In fact the Department of Defense in the 1950's wanted a decentralized dispersed population because they were afraid of nuclear war. That was actually an official policy to spread Americans out as thinly as possible.

Energy is subsidized in various ways, the world depletion allowance. When we buy gas at a pump we think it costs $1.50 a gallon. It really costs more than that because we're not paying for the cleanup of the air, of oil spills. We're not paying for the cost of keeping the Sixth Fleet off the gulf so we can have a secure world supply. We're not paying for a lot of the hidden costs and the external effects of gasoline consumption. So, how do we pay for that? We actually pay for that in our taxes and through a degraded environment and a lower less convenient lifestyle, more air pollution, more congestion and so on. So, by having gas cheap at the pump it's not a subsidy, but it fools us into thinking that it's a cheaper way of moving around than it really is.
Q: You mentioned European cities a moment ago and I want to ask you, how do other countries tackle this issue of sprawl, if at all. In Europe, for instance, cities still work today where ours fell apart after the 1950's.
A: It's funny, many European cities were bombed out in World War II. Their centers were devastated. American cities have been since been devastated by urban renewal and super highways and super blocks and disinvestment. The Europeans, I think after World War II took on, as their project, their national project, the rebuilding of the city and the unofficial policy in America was, I think, actually suburbia, the automobile industry, the oil industry, the sort of zoning, the sort of real estate development that happened on the periphery. So, I think the two cultures just had different projects in the back of their mind or on the front burner. They were focusing on rebuilding cities, put things like transit, a lot of inner city housing, good schools, good amenities, wonderful parks, great museums, great cultural facilities, we have those, too. Some of those started to move to the suburbs, but basically this American dream, I think, went awry as we fled more and more to the periphery and left the center hollowed out and empty.

So, here we are. We sit with these wealthy suburbs surrounding these poor cities and Europe has just the reverse. It has very healthy cities. The wealthy people live in the center of European cities, not on the periphery for the most part - fabulous transit systems, great cultural amenities, great schools, great universities, most of them in the city. So, we've made our bed and we need to sleep in it now. We've opted for mobility. They've opted for place. I think that's a good way to put it. The idea of place, of community, of civic realm, of public realm has been more important and I think our dream has been mobility and freedom which is a wonderful dream. Now, we see what is cost, though, to have mobility and freedom. It means that we have a less of a sense of place. We have less community. We have less beautiful cities. We have less convivial cities, less coherent cities, less legible cities. Maybe we will still opt for mobility and freedom, but we're painfully aware of what the tradeoffs are now.
Q: You mentioned that (in Europe) the wealthy live in the city. Does that create a desirable density just because the wealthy live there? And number two, tell me also what happens to the poor people?
A: The European cities do have wealthy people living downtown. It's not exclusively wealthy. My point is that density, and by the way, new urbanists aren't talking about high density. They're talking about medium density. European cities are truly high density. High density need not be associated with poverty. In fact, wealthy people live very well in high density areas. This is true, of course, of Manhattan and a few other urban exceptions in America. The poor people do tend to live more in the periphery in the so called suburbs or the peripheria, as they call suburbs in Italy, and that's a problem. They're pretty bleak. They have a time bomb ticking there. If we have a time bomb ticking in our central cities, they have one on the periphery.
Q: Please elaborate on the thinking behind the interstate highway system.
A: Of course it was Eisenhower that started the interstate system. I think it was about inner city travel primarily and it was also about moving military vehicles around in case of war, but as I said earlier, it tended to become much about intra metropolitan as inter metropolitan transportation and circulation. First of all the freeways severed neighborhoods. They literally reamed out cities. These giant elevated or sub grade or at grade freeways as they cut through cities invariably dissect the city often in undesirable ways splitting communities right down the middle, but they mainly allow for a lot of people to move very quickly from the inner city to the suburbs. Now, of course, they're congested, but the net migration or commutation between the inner city and the suburbs is primarily enabled by the interstate system.

The other thing the interstates have done is they've tended to devalue the surface streets. In a city like Detroit which has these beautiful radial boulevards that used to be vibrant centers of commerce and civic life, a wonderful, rich public realm are fairly empty now because the vehicles are essentially fleeing to the suburbs in these below grade freeways which tear the city asunder while evacuating it both on a daily basis and then over the course of years it evacuates it in a more permanent way as people migrate out to the suburbs to live. It's been an amazing public works project, lots of mobility, but it has come at great cost.
Q: What kind of neighborhoods were lost in the inner city when the highway systems were built? Who suffered the most?
A: Of course it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the neighborhoods through which these freeways were pushed were invariably the ones were without political or economic clout, typically black neighborhoods or Hispanic neighborhoods or other ethnic minorities. They didn't have the political wherewithal to stop them. So that's where they usually go and they often go right through the middle of these neighborhoods. You see these feeble attempts to reconnect them with these spindly little pedestrian bridges which cross these rivers of.phphalt and concrete that are often an eighth of a mile wide - bridges that no one would ever walk on. They're always empty. I mean to walk across one of those bridges is like walking through a shooting gallery or something. You feel totally naked and exposed and of course the arterial strips that are now invading the city, it's not just at the suburbs - sucked all the energy out. Now, typically arterial suburban development, the strip mall, is moving back into the city. So the beautiful surface boulevards and streets which used to be wonderful public thoroughfares are now widened further by the parking lots that sit in front of the convenience stores in these strips. So there's no sense of place. There's no pedestrian scale. It's basically designed for the car, by the car, of the car.

So the suburbs have not only sucked the city dry now they're sending their tentacles back into the city in low density arterial sorts of developments that don't make for a walkable city. It won't be long before the suburbs have reconsumed the center city which is a problem in many American cities where they're essentially low density suburban cul-de-sac subdivisions are being built on these lots that are vacated because of things like the interstate system that severed the neighborhoods and the racial polarization that also tended to force these neighborhoods apart and so on. So, I think it's a pretty insidious system. I'm for having, as I said, the opportunity to live in low density single use neighborhoods with auto dependence if those people pay their full share of the load.
Q: Explain historically where VA and FHA loans were usable and not usable and the impact on the city.
A: I'll try to do that. I'm not a real expert on that. So, let me say this, the VA loans, as I understand it, favored single family homes. Certainly they were about home ownership. They weren't about renting. Often urban dwellers were renters, suburbanites were homeowners. So already it tilts toward suburbia. I'm not sure about the actual details of the - you know, how they evaluated - that's the basic, the basic tilt was that it favored home ownership. I don't know the details on whether - you'll have to ask someone about the details on that. Do you know? I mean I'm curious.
Q: Yeah, I thought that FHA and VA loans were primarily for new development. In fact, I thought you told us this in the last one that they were for new developments and not for rehabbing housing in the inner city.
A: That's true. The FHA and VA loans were not for rehabbing. They were not for rental. They were for new homes. Well, they were for home ownership which often meant new homes whether it was a town or a smaller subdivision. So, unofficially it favored suburbia. I don't think the letter of the law required you to live in suburbia. It was just that was the tendency of its use when the rubber hit the road, but I know other people can maybe sight chapter and verse on that. I can't.
Q: Yeah, I mean apparently the factories also moved out. There was a decentralization. Homes need to be built around the factories. Therefore there was a favoring of homes that were built near factories and that meant white and black and so on.
A: We should talk about schools at some point. I mean obviously for a city to be viable and attractive and livable it's got to have safety. People have to feel comfortable and safe and they also need to have good schools. The suburbs have tended to get the better schools for all sorts of reasons, some reasonable and maybe some not so reasonable, but the differential in tax base between inner city communities and suburban communities is much greater than most Americans realize. In the Chicago School System which is big, it goes well beyond the city, the differential between the wealthiest communities in that system and the poorest is 28 to 1. That is the wealthiest communities have 28 more times as much tax base per student as the poorest communities. Now there are attempts to reshuffle it back and redistribute that money, but the bottom line is the wealthier communities end up, by hook or by crook, with the better schools. The inner city schools have definitely been visited by all sorts of dysfunction and problems and they've been in decline. That problem is absolutely fundamental. People are not going to move back to the city in large numbers without better schools. Younger people will. Yuppies will. They already are moving back to the lofts. Just in Detroit today the nightclubs, the lofts, that cater to this younger crowd are already a major factor in the downtown real estate market. When these kids grow up and have families, though, that's going to be the test. Are they going to stay in Detroit or Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Chicago or they going to, like their parents, go to the suburbs where the schools are better? I suspect if enough people do live downtown, which seems to be the demographic trend, that they will find a way, they will insist on better urban schools and that will hopefully turn the tide back towards urban living.
Q: Let's talk a little bit about sprawl today.
A: We may over romanticize cities of the past. They had their problems, but certainly a healthy city is a walkable city. Walkability might be the single best measure of urban health. If people are walking lots of other things are right under heaven. It means that their place is worth walking to. It means they're not too far apart. It means there are lots of people living within that area. It means it's safe. It means that it's convivial. There's a lot of serendipitous social interaction. There's a public realm that's alive and vibrant. I think that's a very good measure. I think cities used to be a lot more walkable. Now, for some people they had no choice but to walk, but now where people do have a choice you can go to cities in America, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Charleston where people want to walk. They love it. They love the city. They love the sort of sidewalk life. They love being able to shop without getting in a car and going to the supermarket, without going to a mall where there's too much choice, it takes too long, where they can do their sort of daily errands on foot. I think that's probably the essence of urbanity is walkability, conviviality, a public realm where people are also proud of something beyond their own private world. Suburbia tends to be a private world. It's the television, the family room, the automobile, the computer, the telephone. It tends to be very privatized. Perhaps the home is in a gated subdivision, a gated community. People go to private clubs, private schools. It's all about a private realm.

The city has a public realm. People, I think, feel part of, and even proud of something bigger than themselves. They're proud of the cathedral. They're proud of the city hall, the beautiful park, the church, the handsome high school. They love the gardens. They love the flowers in the public gardens which, of course, don't grow in many parks any more because cities can't afford them because the tax base has gone to suburbia, etc., etc., but I think the city was seen as a place of pleasure and enjoyment, social interaction. It had its problems. I mean there's always been pollution. Horses polluted the street. There's always been noise. There's always been a certain amount of chaos, but it seems to be a more sustainable chaos. I think one of the reasons it is more sustainable socially, as well as environmentally, is that people are forced to rub shoulders with everybody so they see the whole spectrum of human condition. You can grow up in suburbia, you can live in suburbia without seeing much of the spread, the wonder, the magic of the human condition from squalor to luxury.

I think city dwellers are more aware of the sort of full spectrum of the human condition and therefore they understand it better and there's more understanding between people. They're certainly not without friction, but it's better to have little frictions day to day rubbing elbows than a cataclysmic social upheaval you get in a place like Los Angeles where all the wealthy live in privatized suburbs and all the poor live in downtown and you get race riots every generation or so. I would rather have people take out their differences on a day to day basis than in these big social upheavals that visit a polarized society every ten or twenty years.
Q: We were talking about things that make cities work and you were talking about walking.
A: Well, to mention in a little more detail some of these assets of walkability; it really takes four things to make for walkability. You have to have places and destinations worth walking to. So, there has to be a good mix of uses. You have to have a certain density so there are not a lot of people walking to support and justify these destinations. You need a safe environment where people feel safe, not too safe, not bored, but not in fear of their life and you need transit. Walkability and transit go hand in glove. If you have a good transit system you can cover an entire metropolitan region on foot. Transit and walkability, mix use sort of commercial modes that are at every stop on every transit line are what make for a truly walkable city and a truly, I think, sustainable and viable city.

On a whole nother matter, granny flats, it sounds like a second or third order issue, but I think, in fact they're really a quintessential element of urbanity. If you have allies you can take care of the automobile. You can have cars parked back there. You can take care of utilities. You don't have to put them below grade. You can take care of garbage pickup, it's a place for kids to play, it's a place to wash the car, it's a place to work. If you have garages with ally apartments, granny flats, above them, it provides a permanent stock of affordable housing. It's not housing like some subsidized housing that gets traded up in the market and soon it's out of the reach of poorer families. You can have with a three car garage a 600 square foot apartment above it which is plenty big for an empty nester or a young family or a single, but more importantly it allows them owner of the primary residence and to have a second income stream so that all of a sudden the bigger house in the front is more affordable as well to the person that wants that American dream of a three or four bedroom house.

Secondly, without the curb cuts you have more visitor parking. You don't have garage doors facing the street. You have front porches. So, you have a more convivial street. You have a planting strip for trees. So, from the parked car to the planting strip to the front porch, the big house to the backyard to the garage with the alley and above it the garage apartment to the ally itself that cross section makes for a very rich life style, a very affordable lifestyle and I think a lifestyle that also supports transit. It turns out you can do lots of thirty, forty feet wide, even 50 feet wide with these alley apartments and have a density of 15 units per acre which is enough to support bus transit.
Q: How effective is the centralized system of regional government that is used in Minneapolis? Is that something that works? Is that something to graft on to cities?
A: Well, I think Myron Orfield's "Metro Politics" is a really important book and his theory behind it. Essentially it's that metropolitan regions need to be governed in some sort of metropolitan fashion, that if all the tax base flees along with the people to the wealthy second ring suburbs leaving behind the poverty and all the social problems that go along with it in the inner city without the tax base you get a polarized metropolitan region and that just feeds on itself. The suburbs get richer. The inner city gets poorer. The better schools, the better institutions, the better social amenities, cultural amenities, etc., tend to gravitate to the suburbs leaving even greater problems behind in their wake. His point is that until the region equalizes or at least makes more equal the differential and tax base, they're going to be forever fighting each other. By having some sort of regional government which will provide regional planning as well as regional revenue sharing it's possible to even out some of the differences. Now, you say, it's politically dead on arrival. Why would suburbs give up political power? Well, they probably won't voluntarily, but his point is if you take the electoral majority that is formed when you take all the population in the center city, the first ring suburbs which are quite poor now and the third ring suburbs which can't afford to build all the new infrastructure that's required, you have a numerical majority in the state legislature. They can outvote the second rate suburbs, the Oakland County in our case which has within it so much of the wealth and political clout.

Normally people who live downtown who are often minority, feel they have nothing in common with third rank suburbs, but in fact they do. They're both beleaguered financially. They both suffer from a lack of tax base most of which has been concentrated in the second ring. So, his point is a good one that together, if they work together, even though they're politically strange bedfellows, they don't generally think they're on the same side of the fence they are in this particular case.

Once a metropolitan region starts to behave in a regional manner it becomes more competitive in the global economy. The global economy is increasingly about regional city/state economies. It's not about the national economy of France, the United States, and Japan. It's about Paris, Atlanta and Osaka. I mean it's the city that's the economic engine now, the whole city, not just the inner city, the metropolitan region. Those are the units that compete in the global market. A metropolitan region that's at war with itself, that's polarized like Detroit and other American cities, has trouble competing in that global market. They can't attract the talent and the work force and maintain that talent and work force if they have a city that's divided, a metropolitan region that's fighting.

So there are two issues actually, if you want to compete in a global marketplace. You need to have a coherent metropolitan region so that it's a livable place that will attract a solid and talented and well educated work force, but you also don't want municipalities within the metropolitan region fighting to attract industry. The way they fight is by lowering their tax base. So you have municipality A fighting municipality B, maybe even municipality C all within the same region. They're each lowering, as they jockey to win these new industries, with lower and lower tax rates, essentially giving away the farm. They're competing against themselves. They should be competing against another metropolitan region whether it's in the United States or Asia or Australia or Europe. So this lack of regional coordination not only diminishes the sort of coherence of the region and the livability of the region, it tends to be counter productive in terms of attracting new industry because it's done at the price of individual communities giving up a lot of tax base.
Q: How does Grand Rapids' system of regional government compare with that in Minneapolis?
A: Grand Rapids is, I guess, the first city and maybe only city to have any regional government. I don't know how much teeth it has. By the way, even in Minneapolis with Myron Orfield on the ground there they've been able to decrease the tax differential across the cross section, the metropolis, but it's still pretty broad. I think it's 15 to 1 rather than 30 to 1. So it's not a panacea, but it's a good ideal, a good direction in which to go. I can't tell you much about Grand Rapids. I can say that Detroit is particularly polarized. It's a long ways from any regional planning much less regional revenue sharing. Whether it will wake up in time, I don't know, but it's certainly at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy right now because it doesn't have a reputation for being a livable place.
Q: Talk about why Portland works.
A: Well, Portland is blessed with a beautiful sight. It has a good history. The people that went west on the Oregon Trail were two types. There were the God fearing Christians and there were the people who were out to make a fast buck. When they got to the end of the Oregon Trail the God fearing family folk went south into the Elmaent Valley and founded cities like Portland. The ones that wanted to make a lot of money on fur or gold or lumber or fishing went north to Seattle and to this day Seattle is very different than Portland. Portland is the best managed city in America. It is blessed with a downtown with the smallest blocks of any city in the US so it's very walkable. It's always had a vibrant downtown and now it has a good transit system, not as good as European cities, but it's quite good by American standards and it has urban growth boundaries. It's the poster child of new urbanism and environmental urbanism and the whole idea of growth management. It does it by essentially drawing a line around its city allowing little, if any, development beyond that line, trying to reign in that sort of endless spreading of sprawl. It's worked quite well and it hasn't raised the cost of housing which is the typical fear that if you contain the land area housing costs are going to go up. That has not been the case. It is more expensive, but that's because a of people want to live there. It's not because of the growth boundaries. There's been a lot of new industry there and so on.

The problem with the urban growth boundary is whether, because it's a political line, it will withstand the pressure to move it out. If people on one side of a line inside the line can sell their land and develop it at a much higher rate than the people on the outside there's a huge financial difference that line, which is a political line, it's not drawn along rivers. It's drawn by human beings, as long as that line has that huge differential there will always be pressure to push it out because the people on the outside who want to make as much money as the people on the inside, always wanted out. So they've held it quite well in Portland, but it will be hard. When they set the same line up in Seattle there was a lot of political gerrymandering because people knew that it would affect their wealth, which side of the line they were on.

The alternative is not to have a metropolitan growth boundary, but to have rural or environmentally drawn lines which are not politically drawn. They're drawn around rural areas or sensitive areas or environmentally important areas. They're probably politically a little easier to maintain over the years because they have a rational that's sort of more scientifically and ecologically demonstrable. But all in all the growth boundary, it's a crude tool. It's been adopted in Florida and Washington state as well as Oregon. Although it's a crude tool it's a good one. It does contain growth. It doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the communities built within the boundary are any better. You can get just a slightly denser version of sprawl inside the metro. It's a good locational tool but it doesn't necessarily mean you get mixed use, walkable, mixed income compact communities.
Q: It sounds somewhat European and I'm wondering whether there's a risk there, which would be that you create a wealthy downtown and you spread your poverty to somewhere else. You just displace it.
A: No, I think all the people in Portland pretty much live within that, the rich, the poor, the middle class, but you're actually right. It is European. If anyone has flown into Europe they know it's a very sharp division. They can see it etched in the landscape of where the town or the city ends and the beautiful green farms and open space begins, a very strong line. In America, find any American city and it's a very blurred line. The city slow dissipates and disintegrates into a low density rural pattern of development. Portland aligned does feel more European. It does feel more European. I think it's potentially a better system. I think that sort of smear, the sort of monocultural smear that spreads out on the edge of most American cities is not a particularly desirable place to live. The real estate values are often low around those arterial strips in a lot of that sort of fringe development. So I think Portland is deservedly and rightfully so, the poster child of a lot of this new urbanist thinking and a lot of environmental thinking and a lot of just solid urban thinking.
Q: How crucial is regional planning to redevelopment of cities?
A: I think regional planning is very important. I don't think it's as important as regional tax base sharing or regional revenue sharing. We can make beautiful plans, but they're not going to be implemented unless the money is there. Downtowns in America are actually rebounding quite well. It's the inner city neighborhoods between downtown and the suburbs that are floundering, that have no investment, that have poverty and dysfunction and dislocation. That's a problem that only revenue sharing, I think, will help redress that inner city neighborhood. That's the really difficult part to get investment going again. Well, regional planning is essential but insufficient. If it's not accompanied by economic policies it just won't have the teeth and the clout to be realized. Many cities have beautiful regional plans, but unless there's money behind it - inner cities and inner city neighborhoods, for a long time, tried to reattract investment by doing urban furniture and landscaping, for instance, you know beautiful brick pedestrian streets with trees and planters and benches and all. That's not enough. You need to get economic activity downtown. You need people living downtown. You need shops. It's really the shops lining those streets that make for viable cities. It's not the street furniture as nice as the street trees are and furniture. You need economic health. So cities, try as they might, with these sorts of amenities, unless they've got the people, the shops, the jobs, are whistling Dixie. It's a futile attempt.
Continued