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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)

Wouldn't that just worsen social car dependency?

I don't think he sees "car dependency" as a problem.

Every city in America is a 15-minute city if you take automobiles into account. Thanks to automobiles, the typical U.S. urban resident lives within 15 minutes of more than 100,000 jobs, several different supermarkets that compete hard for their business, one or two shopping malls, parks and other recreation facilities, a variety of health care facilities, friends and relatives, and many other potential destinations and activities. Even the densest cities in the world can’t provide that kind of variety and opportunity within 15 minutes on foot.

An older article:

According to the 2000 census, Los Angeles is the densest urban area in the United States, and 89.5 percent of Los Angeles commuters usually drive to work. Just to the south, San Diego is only half as dense as L.A., and 90.9 percent of its commuters drive to work. Atlanta is only half as dense as San Diego, and 93.5 percent of its commuters drive to work. And Lompoc California is about half as dense as Atlanta, and 94.4 percent of its commuters drive to work. So doubling density might get a little more than 1 percent of commuters out of their cars. That’s not much.

Low densities, large parking lots, and other indicators of sprawl are effects of automotive technology. They don’t make people auto dependent; they enable people to be auto liberated. Density and various design features planners want to impose will have, at best, marginal effects on the amount of driving people do.

Thanks in part to cars, the average American takes only about three or four thousand steps per day and looks like a WALL-E character. I suppose that the standard libertarian perspective on this would be that the revealed preference of Americans is to avoid physical movement and that governments should try to accommodate that preference, but it's surely not how I'd like my city to approach things.

I walk a ton living in San francisco. But I also step over a lot of shit and see a lot of demoralizing stuff on the street. Couple days ago saw someone feeding a mouse near a dumpster to their pitbull.

I walked way more when I was in grad school and lived with my parents in a far exurb of LA. I almost never walk at all now that I live in a very "dense and walkable" urban neighborhood. Walking in the exurbs was pleasant, leaf-dappled, and contemplative. Every fifth house or so, kids playing in the front yard. Dogs running behind backyard brick walls and barking "who are you!?!"

Walking in the city is an exercise of stepping to the curb to let other people pass every 10 feet, having to rewind the podcast I'm listening to because of sirens, stepping over homeless, trying not to trip on the shitty uneven sidewalks, and not skewer myself on all the wrought-iron and chain-link fencing. Not appetizing at all.

Yesterday I walked to a large park down the street from my suburban house and kicked a soccer ball with my son. I am lean and my son walks, runs and bikes through large parks and trails with me regularly.

The suburbs are great for outdoors exercise. Rather than walking him past open air drug markets and homeless encampments, we're walking through clean parks and trails.

I choose not to be a fatty and the suburbs easily accommodate me. I do drive to work though, so I suppose I get fewer steps in than some alternative. But then I absolutely won't live by my office building and I will not subject myself or my family to the urban blight ruined public transportation.

I guess I'd say I'm revealing a preference for an active life in a clean environment. So of course I don't live in the local major urban center.

That’a certainly one of the drawbacks, but it’s also worth considering this in both historical and global contexts.

From historical perspective, Americans have been driving a lot for many decades now, but obesity rates have only shot through the roof relatively recently. This means that other factors contributing to obesity might have much bigger impact than driving.

Second, it is worth observing that European countries, which allegedly are more walkable, and where people drive less, are rather quickly catching up to obesity rates of Americans. The upward trend is clear and is not looking like it is plateauing in most countries. See eg. Germany or UK.

The fat people I know might very well walk to the store but prefer to drive. You only need to get fat once, for whatever reason, and walking suddenly becomes unfeasible. And there are many reasons for which people become fat regardless of whether their neighborhood is walkable. What's more, I suspect that the kinds of people who get fat are the kinds of people who would not want to walk in the first place.

Linking walkability to obesity is largely nonsense, in my opinion. I can't give you a definite cause for why obesity has become more prevalent, but it has little to do with sidewalks and distance to possible walking targets.

What explains Europe? Is it the food? It can't be smoking or leaded gasoline that was keeping the obesity down over there (unless they regulated those things later than us).

This is not Europe, this is everywhere. As for explanation, I like how Charles Murray's wife has put it:

We decide exactly what we're hungry for and make it for dinner, every day, from a far longer list of favorites than people had 60 years ago. The perfect way to generate weight gain. And we are not alone.

Even if you refrain from eating snacks or sweets (and these also have been extremely optimized for palatability, with many different local maximums to choose from), we are no longer constrained by difficulty of obtaining ingredients, or cost for normal breakfast/lunch/dinner sort of food. Everything is available close by (or can be ordered online), and everything is very cheap relative to our incomes.

...That does make sense. We're more globalized, and we're also the opposite of starving, in general.

In this article, the same author considers various studies on alleged links between sprawl and obesity. According to him, one study (peer-reviewed in a medical journal) shows only "small but significant associations" between sprawl and obesity, and two other studies suggest that "obesity causes sprawl. That is, obese people choose to live in sprawling communities because such neighborhoods are better suited for their needs."

Of course, that article is sixteen years old at this point, and many of the links in it are dead, so maybe the conclusions to which he comes in it are wrong.

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