As a designer concerned about climate change, Asa Highsmith is passionate about providing alternatives to car-dependent suburbia in Oklahoma City, where his firm, Common Works Architects, is based.
The links between global warming and car-centric urban sprawl are well established. In a 2013 study, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that households in U.S. suburbs have significantly higher levels of planet-warming emissions than those in city centers. Household transportation emissions, in particular, are higher in the suburbs because people there generally drive instead of walking, biking, or taking public transportation.
In Oklahoma City, many of Highsmith’s peers in development circles and the local government are also pushing to densify neighborhoods and reduce car dependency. But even with this momentum behind it, Common Works Architects sometimes struggles to make its designs a reality.
Parking is one common sticking point. In the past few years, the topic has emerged as a priority for advocates of high-quality urbanism, who argue that an over-provision of parking spaces impedes walkability, leads to greater driving, and raises housing costs, among other challenges. But when Highsmith tries to include fewer than normal parking spots in his projects, he often encounters resistance.
“I can convince the approvals department at Oklahoma City that we should be allowed to do less parking, and I can even sometimes convince my client that we need less parking,” he said. But when commercial lenders enter the picture, they often balk at this proposal.
For one project, a multifamily housing development located across the street from a large grocery store in an amenity-rich neighborhood near downtown Oklahoma City, lenders refused to finance the building unless Common Works Architects changed its design to include at least 28 parking spots. This necessitated major alterations such as the addition of a parking lot and a driveway bisecting the site. The significant cost of these changes ate into the funds the development team had planned to spend on buildings, forcing it to reduce the number of apartment units, Highsmith said.
“A lot of people think that the developer or the client gets final say on all decisions on a project, but 99% of development is private, and 99% of that is based on some kind of commercial loan or lending,” he said. “That means that really the final, final say on any decision – even design, even aesthetics – we get comments from some invisible bank board.”
Highsmith’s experience with lenders is not unique. Matthew Adair, a doctoral candidate in urban planning at McGill University, recently interviewed 50 people involved in financing multifamily housing across the United States for his dissertation. He found that commercial lenders’ laser focus on minimizing risk in their investments frequently prevents new ideas from taking hold in development.
“The industry is not well positioned to innovate with housing, because they really just want to finance what has been built before,” Adair said. “Their most ideal project is building the same project that already exists on the same block, because those conditions have been proven to succeed, and they can look at the profit margins for that project and see that it’s been successful.”
Sprawl begets sprawl
Many Americans would prefer to live in communities where they can walk to destinations like schools, stores, and restaurants, but only a tiny fraction of the nation’s developed land fits this description. As a result, real estate is generally significantly more expensive in walkable areas than in car-dependent suburbs, putting this lifestyle out of reach for most people who want it. But as Highsmith has found, many people encounter barriers when they try to create developments that would make more neighborhoods walkable.
According to Susan Handy, director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California, Davis, car-dependent sprawl has been the default urban form for so long in the U.S. that it’s firmly baked into every aspect of the development process.
“We’re doing it because that is what we’ve been doing for a century,” she said. “It’s built into policies, practices, zoning codes, design standards … But it’s also just what people are used to doing.”
This is true for most players involved in the complex process of planning, building, and operating cities.
“It’s this whole system, on the public-sector side, on the private-sector side, that conspires to replicate this car-oriented suburban development that is pervasive across the U.S.,” Handy said.
Jonathan Rosenbloom, a law professor at Albany Law School who leads the nonprofit organization Sustainable Development Code, agrees that the nation’s long history of suburban development is key to understanding the current paradigm.
“Eisenhower’s highway system [in the 1950s] was one of the first singular major steps, but even before that, we had 40 years of minor steps pushing into the suburbs,” he said.
Over the decades, a robust network of interdependent processes and players has evolved to propagate this model.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh yeah, this policy here is in place and that’s what’s doing it,’” Rosenbloom said. “Rather, it’s a system of dozens of different parts in the local, the state, and the federal system, whether we’re talking about tax or land use or real estate or infrastructure. Many of those things are pushing to make it more efficient for developers to develop in this way.”
Who’s responsible for improving walkability?
The systemic nature of the challenge often leads to finger-pointing, Rosenbloom said. For example, some city governments say that they lack funds to take vital steps like improving public transportation because of federal policies that allow large nonprofit urban landowners – universities and hospitals, for example – to avoid paying property taxes. In the absence of changes to federal tax policy, they say, there’s nothing they can do.
Overcoming challenges like these will require a wide spectrum of different groups to collaborate more effectively. When 1000 Friends of Oregon, a nonprofit focused on land use in Oregon, wanted to understand why efforts to build dense developments around public transportation hubs (also known as transit-oriented development, or TOD) in Portland were floundering, it reviewed studies of similar projects from around the world and interviewed people involved in local efforts. The resulting report said that strong relationships were critical.
“The first barrier to TOD policy development and implementation identified in the literature, and by far the most common between articles, is stakeholder relationships,” wrote author Jonathan Chenchar.
But improving collaboration between different groups isn’t enough to create meaningful change; the myriad stakeholders involved in city-building also need to evolve. This could necessitate significant changes for a wide range of groups: municipalities, state transportation departments, federal agencies, banks, developers, designers, and more.
Rosenbloom believes that city governments, in particular, could do much more to support
