Doughnut Hole Downtowns in the Midwest
I'm going to jump up on my soapbox and talk really quickly about something that has been bothering the heck out me - the value (or lack there of in some places)as land as a commodity. The past few days I have been discovering the insane amount of suburban development that has been occurring around my hometown in the Louisville, KY metro the past year and a half since I moved to San Francisco.
New homes are being built at an astonishing rate and developing is pushing further and further away from the old city center's I knew in my youth. There are highways being built to facilitate traffic flow and make the suburban commute even easier. Strip malls and theaters are going up where cornfields and forests one stood, only miles away from where they used to be located. Although there has been much emphasis on creating a downtown that is a commercial, cultural and creative hub especially in the City of Louisville, many smaller towns in the metro, are finding residential flight and little redevelopment in their commercial central business districts (CBDs), thus they are becoming doughnut-hole-like satellite cities, surrounding a central hub such as the city of Louisville.
Educated urban planners call this phenominon"Sprawl". Commercial development happens complete separate to residential planning. There is little visable regard to providing for infrastructure development, conservation or long-term planning. Yes, maybe commercial should have been developed alongside residential all this time, but is it right for commercial to follow new residential further and further outside the bounds of what use to define a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). I attribute this sprawling development trend to the following factors:
1. Land especially in rural areas in the Midwest is significantly undervalued. While prices are high elsewhere in the country for land, in the midwest they are unreasonably low. High cost of urban redevelopment on brownfields regardless of contamination or a lack thereof is probably a large contributor to this. Because of the relative high development cost people are forced outward. Vast quantities of undeveloped land and carefully conserved "greenbelts" all over the place. In the midwest, these rings around cities were probably conserved more out of rural poverty than intentioned advocacy for the land. Still these "green-belts" are diminishing. In places such as California they have been preserved through things such as land trusts, but this is not the case in places such as rural Indiana and Kentucky where they are beginning to become suburbs as the inner cities become vacated and the city form takes the shape of the traditional doughnut.
2. Struggling farming industry and globalization of mass-produced food sources, has been a factor as well. Small-scale farmers have struggled to make ends meet for years while sitting on a gold mine of land to speculate with. Urban land is much more realistically valued in the Midwest but in rural areas land is plentiful and these days developing a sub-division on former farm-land as housing is much more profitable than struggling to sell crops.
3. The cheapness and simplicity of driving in this area of the country is unparalleled. The state of Indiana just widened the highway (I-65) by an additional two lanes and really with TARC as the only transit alternative, there is no viable transit alternative in which the community is willing to sink significant capital development dollars other than highways. People drive everywhere yet do not pay for the negative externalities of increased pollution, congestion, urban blight, loss to the landscape etc... It is an example of the tragedy of the commons and one of the failures of capitalistic, laissez fare economics where we fail to account for the negative actions created as everyone looks out for themselves, and no-one looks out for the whole. Simply implementing new policy written about conservation for the good of the community, could go a long way to solve this.
At some point one has to suggest other solutions thought to address the economics of the issues and I can see one in working to artificially augment the value of land as a non-renewable resource. (meaning land that is not the "built-environment") Through private or public land trusts one could change the value of this precious resource. In the meantime, I think it would behoove me to go and finish a book I began in graduate school Suburban Nation.
New homes are being built at an astonishing rate and developing is pushing further and further away from the old city center's I knew in my youth. There are highways being built to facilitate traffic flow and make the suburban commute even easier. Strip malls and theaters are going up where cornfields and forests one stood, only miles away from where they used to be located. Although there has been much emphasis on creating a downtown that is a commercial, cultural and creative hub especially in the City of Louisville, many smaller towns in the metro, are finding residential flight and little redevelopment in their commercial central business districts (CBDs), thus they are becoming doughnut-hole-like satellite cities, surrounding a central hub such as the city of Louisville.
Educated urban planners call this phenominon"Sprawl". Commercial development happens complete separate to residential planning. There is little visable regard to providing for infrastructure development, conservation or long-term planning. Yes, maybe commercial should have been developed alongside residential all this time, but is it right for commercial to follow new residential further and further outside the bounds of what use to define a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). I attribute this sprawling development trend to the following factors:
1. Land especially in rural areas in the Midwest is significantly undervalued. While prices are high elsewhere in the country for land, in the midwest they are unreasonably low. High cost of urban redevelopment on brownfields regardless of contamination or a lack thereof is probably a large contributor to this. Because of the relative high development cost people are forced outward. Vast quantities of undeveloped land and carefully conserved "greenbelts" all over the place. In the midwest, these rings around cities were probably conserved more out of rural poverty than intentioned advocacy for the land. Still these "green-belts" are diminishing. In places such as California they have been preserved through things such as land trusts, but this is not the case in places such as rural Indiana and Kentucky where they are beginning to become suburbs as the inner cities become vacated and the city form takes the shape of the traditional doughnut.
2. Struggling farming industry and globalization of mass-produced food sources, has been a factor as well. Small-scale farmers have struggled to make ends meet for years while sitting on a gold mine of land to speculate with. Urban land is much more realistically valued in the Midwest but in rural areas land is plentiful and these days developing a sub-division on former farm-land as housing is much more profitable than struggling to sell crops.
3. The cheapness and simplicity of driving in this area of the country is unparalleled. The state of Indiana just widened the highway (I-65) by an additional two lanes and really with TARC as the only transit alternative, there is no viable transit alternative in which the community is willing to sink significant capital development dollars other than highways. People drive everywhere yet do not pay for the negative externalities of increased pollution, congestion, urban blight, loss to the landscape etc... It is an example of the tragedy of the commons and one of the failures of capitalistic, laissez fare economics where we fail to account for the negative actions created as everyone looks out for themselves, and no-one looks out for the whole. Simply implementing new policy written about conservation for the good of the community, could go a long way to solve this.
At some point one has to suggest other solutions thought to address the economics of the issues and I can see one in working to artificially augment the value of land as a non-renewable resource. (meaning land that is not the "built-environment") Through private or public land trusts one could change the value of this precious resource. In the meantime, I think it would behoove me to go and finish a book I began in graduate school Suburban Nation.
posted by Billy Riggs at 11/25/2004 10:45:00 PM
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