DC Approved 4,000 New Housing Units This Year, But Is It Enough?

 

Once a streetcar suburb reaches a critical density of white people, it has officially arrived at its Platonic ideal Form, and redevelopment must be halted for fear of yuppies casting shadows on hipsters

Twitter tells me that earlier tonight, “not-ruling-it-out” possible future mayoral contender (and local smart growth demigod) Tommy Wells held his inaugural book club meeting; the book discussed was Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City. DC’s chief planner Harriet Tregoning was also there, and while she’s been relatively good to the cause of density in DC, the kinds of people who would show up to a Tommy Wells Triumph of the City book club probably want a bit more out of her, so I presume (again, I wasn’t there) that she ended up being one of the least radical people there.

One person tweeted regarding the book club: “Building permit data says DC on track for 4,000 new housing units this year,” which I presume was a statement made by someone defending DC’s supply expansion efforts.

Four thousand may sound like a lot, but is it? I’m sure most of the units are studios and 1-bedroom apartments, and since they’re almost all luxury units (as all new construction in heavily supply-constrained markets tends to be), it’s not likely that people are going to pack themselves very tightly into them. So let’s give the city the benefit of the doubt and say that’s enough room for 8,000 people.

DC’s population is 600,000, so making room for 8,000 new people each year is allowing for housing stock growth of roughly 1.3% annually. The national population growth is about 0.85-0.9% annually, so at first glance 1.3% looks pretty good.

But then again, there are well over 200 million Americans living in suburban, exurban, and rural areas, and DC is positively booming right now. If we’re to believe all this propaganda about how density is our future (and I, just like Tommy Wells and Harriet Tregoning, do believe it), then shouldn’t America’s most upwardly mobile city be adding more than 4,000 new units a year?

The answer, I suspect, is that most of the latest crop of urbanists in America have bought into James Howard Kunstler’s New Urbanist ideas about “proper” urban scale. Kunstler isn’t the only New Urbanist, but he’s a founding member, and his vision of America’s future is one where everyone more or less stays where they are, but just moves a bit closer together.

So in Kunstler’s Bay Area, for example, people wouldn’t crowd into San Francisco, Oakland, and Silicon Valley. Rather, they’d just basically move to the center of their own town, be it in North Bay or halfway to Sacramento. (As for mass transit infrastructure, which is now nearly nonexistent in these places, they’ll say, “Just replace the roads with trains,” though this belies a poor understanding understanding of the symbiotic relationship between rail and standard post-industrial revolution agglomeration patterns.)

That is to say, the New Urbanist vision – and that of DC’s planners, it seems – has no place for a rapidly (re)growing core. Downtown and the pretty (and, perhaps not coincidentally, white) streetcar suburbs around it are all dense enough, thank you very much – take your crazy ideas about density to the suburbs, where they really need it!

This is a fantasy, though. (Well, personally it’s my nightmare, but I guess some people like the idea of reverting back to 17th century settlement patterns.) It will never happen. Big cities and density go together for a reason, and if America is going to re-urbanize (which I think it will), it’s going to be in the patterns of traditional metropolitan areas, not small, dense settlements scattered randomly throughout the country.

To explain exactly why is beyond my pay grade (although you could start by looking at German and Japanese train schedules), so instead I’ll just leave a challenge for those who think that America can densify “in place”: what are you trying to emulate? Does it exist anywhere other than in James Howard Kunstler’s post-apocalyptic fever dream, or are you trying to forge a new urban model that’s distinct from anything that’s ever existed in the industrialized world?

Via: Forbes