Whenever I tell someone that I’m a city planner, the response is either “what do you plant in the city?” or “This city sure needs some planning!” The first response owes to my north Mississippi accent, the second to the chaos of streets and land development that don’t appear to have any order other than droppings from on high.
The problem stems from lack of match between planners’ drawings and the realty of market place decisions.
Land developers are like movie producers. They must act as the puppeteer who pulls many strings to make the show happen – business plan (including site design), market potential study, financing, regulatory permits, marketing, construction management – and all the strings are part of an overlapping, iterative process that is difficult and risky. The cost of the public mandates for building utilities and roads before any sales revenue is realized can be daunting.
Thus most land development is done in small increments for single use sites of either residential or commercial but not as a mixed use unit connected to other developments to form a sustainable whole community.
The small increments of development are usually isolated from other developments spread around the urban area beyond the boundaries of the city where land is cheaper and easier to assemble.
After a few years these increments of single uses produce a patchwork quilt of sub-urban development that is scattered and disconnected. The different types of land use are segregated and unsustainable.
The single-family subdivisions are created for buyers who each pay the same price per house, and because age and income seem to go together, most buyers are at the same life-cycle stage.
Over time the subdivisions created for younger age groups must have a new wave of younger buyers when the initial buyers move to another life-cycle stage and type of housing.
If the younger age pool for the next wave is smaller and/or has less income, home vacancies will last longer and prices will decline relative to inflation. At the extreme a general malaise will set in and the subdivision will become stagnant and decline.
When the next wave is smaller with less buying power, the market cannibalizes the existing urban fabric and the oldest subdivisions are cast off causing widespread abandonment. Government subsidies to produce affordable housing are often part of the process.
Thus we have a picture of urban sprawl in Memphis and elsewhere. The billions of public tax dollars to support new waves of land development and at the same time try to revitalize older areas becomes the number one public policy issue even though jobs, crime, education and health are considered more important. However, if public and private investments in land are wasted, our economy is hard pressed to tackle the other issues.
Throughout the last century both public agencies and private land developers have sought to create suburban subdivisions in the form of complete towns with a planned mix of houses for multiple life stages integrated with retail, office and industry.
The 1930s “greenbelt towns” built by the Roosevelt Administration during the Depression, as part of “Keynesian pump priming,” were based on a “new town” movement that began in England in 1902 and is nurtured today by the “new urbanists.”
In the 1960s, private corporations produced Reston, VA and Columbia, MD outside of Washington, DC. Both were planned as “new towns” and while they matured and became successful, the original developments went into bankruptcy because of the huge land and infrastructure costs not matching sales in the early years.
In 1969 a planned “new town” at Shelby Farms for 75,000 people with over 2,000 acres of park and open space was an outgrowth of the desire to curb sprawl and create more efficient growth for Memphis; but the local land developers saw free land being given to one developer as unfair competition and their campaign to defeat the project was successful.
More recently smaller “new towns” have been successful such as the Kentlands in Maryland and Celebration in Florida both designed like Memphis’ Harbor Town. These developments and their predecessors were all designed to capture suburban growth in compact, mixed use, self contained communities and reduce carrying costs for taxpayers and the natural environment.
So what’s the answer as we go forward?
The Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization is preparing a long-range Transportation Plan that is supposed to match land use to transportation facilities, but can this change the way land is developed in the small homogenous increments and curb sprawl in Desoto, Fayette, Tipton and Marshall counties?
Can AC Wharton renew Memphis if most of the land investments are made outside of Memphis? The same question is being raised in Cleveland, Atlanta and other large and small metropolitan centers throughout America.
The Obama administration has policy proposals that would create holistic renewal approaches coupled with metropolitan level planning to curb sprawl. Yet, the immediate need to stimulate the economy has resulted in funding for “shovel ready projects”, which just happen to be sprawl friendly road projects.
However, this Great recession seems like a perfect time for Memphis government, civic groups and land developers to meet and figure out an approach for creating subdivisions that appeal to several life cycle stages so we don’t keep on robbing existing subdivisions to support the land market.
